Odio
by DanteBeatrice77
Summary: Maura has been asked by Paddy to take care of some things for him in the likely event of his execution. In the process, she meets a mysterious woman that she cannot help but feel pulled to. With Casey now seemingly out of the picture, can Jane return to her old self and reclaim Maura's heart in time? Eventual Rizzles with a dose of Maura/OC until then.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: Well... I'm back for a bit. This new story is the result of some soul searching away from my previous fic, _Anticipation. _I'm not sure if the last chapter of that fic will go up soon or not, but I know that I want to keep updating this one pretty regularly. Fair warning: while I did enjoy writing _Anticipation_, I wanted to explore the character of Erica D'Arcangelo in a bit of a different light, as in a more definite one, one where she was more definitely shady and less moralistic/involved with righteousness and the law. Part of this fic is my attempt at that. That means she's in here, just with a few tweaks, like her name. The other part is me hoping Jane will get her head out of her ass and go after Maura. So, without further ado, here you go: the first chapter of _Odio. _Let me know what you think.**

* * *

Maura knew, as she strode into the olive light of the hallway she had just found, that she should not be there. The building had to be at least eighty years old – the dank smell of damp walls slithered up her nose, and the _buzz buzz zap _of some rogue and dying lightbulb made her feel cold. The only accompanying sound happened to be the _click click click _of her high heels, and she wondered at the way it perfectly signified the roulette she was playing. Any moment, the loaded _click, _the one with all the consequences, would call someone forth from one of the rooms she passed. She only hoped that she would have enough time to explain herself, identify herself, before they attacked. No crevices lent themselves to hiding; she surmised that it wouldn't matter if they did – the people here lived in crevices, on the fringes. They would know in an instant where she hid. The only cover for her seemed to rise from the ground up, leaving the most important parts of her raw, and exposed. _Not much different than home life at the moment. _Shadows lapped at her bare calves and around her heels, no doubt from the poorly designed lighting system above her head, and where shadows took on a life of their own, that was where people like her did not belong.

People like her.

People in law enforcement. No, she wasn't a cop, but she was a medical examiner, whose work kept cops in their jobs. All the people she loved were cops, or at least related to cops. The danger, the irony, was not lost on her – for the first time in her solitary life, she had a family, a group of people that she cared for so much that sometimes she felt that care scraping against her chest like sandpaper, and those people were very likely to encounter some injury, mortal or otherwise, while on duty. She'd experienced it several times – watched colleagues and friends tumble to the ground the way only lead could initiate, or cried hot, large tears to mimic the blood that oozed from wounds too big for her to stitch up. She, the Maura Isles hellbent on safety, normalcy, belonging, had unwittingly surrounded herself with chaos – letting it in, letting it settle, letting it use her kitchen and her bathrooms and even her bed, if only ever in a platonic sense. _Jane._

She could not tell if the pressure against her chest came from nerves, the dissipated light at the end of the hallway she had just traversed, or the content of her pondering. Nevertheless, in her painted-on navy dress, heavy necklace like something out of an Egyptian vault, she palmed the doorknob before her. She had tried, valiantly, to dress appropriately, which included the smoky eye makeup she sported and the sliver bangles against her wrist. Her hair fell forward to frame her face, to cover it, to mask it if necessary. Everything about her moaned _danger, danger. _

_Now or never, _she mused, and pushed her way into the one room no one would expect to find her.

* * *

_SCHWAK._

Jane's fist blistered through the stale air of the BPD gym, erupting against the punching bag with something a little like vengeance. The punch morphed into a barrage, one for every bead of sweat stinging her left eye. How long had she been at this? Long enough that her sports bra, the only thing on her upper body, had soaked through. She shivered as she became cognizant of the dampness against her back. She shrugged and continued, remembering her purpose, and the fact that she would be alone for the night. Maura had told her that she would be out, probably late. She assumed for a date, until the medical examiner had run a thumb over her forearm and shook her head. Jane must have made a face. She had only said, "a meeting," and left the bullpen after her goodbyes to the homicide squad.

Maura didn't dress that way for meetings; Jane felt her knuckles explode against leather before she even realized she'd released. Although, Maura had begun to dress to kill more often, seemingly right after she dumped Casey. Or it could be that Jane had only begun to notice since then - she cursed herself internally at the thought. She missed a lot of things while hung up on that man; she figured because she funneled all her energy into trying to become someone she wasn't. His betrayal, going back on his word and begging of her to follow him, in addition to the pregnancy scare, bestowed on her a sort of rebirth, a new awareness. She had scrutinized herself in the mirror after learning of the false positive – she looked thin, haggard, results of her attempt to feminize herself, to submit to a man and his body, both of which she only saw perhaps four times a year.

So, though she realized she had a lot of apologizing to do to her friends and family, and a lot of lost time to make up, she decided that her body would be the first thing to change. That, as an athlete and a cop, she could control. She had a physical coming up, and it provided the perfect excuse to train. When she breathed in and took a step back from the punching bag, she took note of the heaviness, the power, in her tread. There now existed a force that hadn't been in her in a long time, and she cataloged the changes when she turned her head to the mirrored wall at her left.

Her body presented a much different story than the one it had told the few months earlier. The harshness of her angles, brought about by her thinness, had softened, and in some places all but disappeared. Her face, sweaty and dusky, remained long, sharp. Her eyes were the first and only parts of her above the neck to reflect a change: they sparkled, pooled, and ebbed in the light. Maura had called them _Bay of Naples in nighttime. _And Maura had traveled to that exact moment in time and space, so she believed her, even though her cheeks had flushed at the comment. Her face told her that she still was Jane Rizzoli: Sicilian, strong, young, wildfire.

However, the stasis ended there – she certainly was not the Jane Rizzoli that Casey knew. She had begun to reach inside of herself and pull out some ancienter Jane, one even Maura might have trouble recalling. Her trapezii raised against the straps of her bra like Vesuvius: inconspicuous at first and casual glance, but rippling with danger upon closer inspection. Cephalic veins ran along her biceps like twin currents, carrying fiery blood to the terrain of muscle just beneath. Maura had remarked that Jane's prominent cephalic and ulnar veins denoted a particularly splendid musculature. Jane laughed at that, Maura simply reached for her glass of wine after having run her fingers along said veins.

Looking down toward her sculpted abdominals and legs, Jane smiled at her progress. _Almost there_. She had thickened, and that made for a much more intimidating demeanor, if her previous one could be improved upon. She surveyed the work she and Maura had done one last time – her with her catholic devotion to exercise, and the doctor with her precise measurements of diet and distribution of supplements (all natural, of course, as she would not let the detective forget). Their pet project, she sometimes thought of it as. She wondered where exactly Maura was at the moment, when usually she was down here, offering commentary on Jane's workout and handing her whatever she needed to ingest at that moment.

In fact, the prospect of Jane's training brought them closer again after Hurricane Casey last blew through their lives. While she was grateful to have a practically free personal trainer and nutritionist, she also was grateful for the time it gave her with best friend. Time they had lost in months past. Things finally ascended toward the up and up, however. The detective mused that today had been the only hiccup in their usually cemented routine. A routine that she closed her eyes to picture, commencing with Maura stretching her and ended with the same. In fact, at the end of her workout, like now, the pathologist would run hands over the just-strained muscles, speaking breathlessly about their immaculate shape, as though she were the one who had just demolished a speedbag or blasted through a lifting session, and not Jane. When she opened her eyes again, her arms tingled with the almost-there pinpricks of Maura's alternating fingernails and palms. She filed away the sensation to ask the doctor about later.

"Staring at yourself again, Janie?" a familiar nasally Bostonian filled the once empty gym, along with the shuffle of a gymbag and some freeweights.

"Yup, just debating which arm to beat the shit out of you with, little brother," laughed Jane, her voice hoarse from lack of use and bodily exertion. She caught Frankie's eye in the mirror and flashed him a guilty grin.

Her brother took her current regimen boost as a chance to spend more time with her, and met her down here twice a week, sometimes more. His kind eyes fluttered and danced as he returned the sentiment, an agreement to spar passing between them without so much as a word. She thanked whatever deity looked over her that they had regained this silent highway of communication after Casey left, and she was thankful to him for picking up the slack enough to reaffirm their bond. Not many weighty words left her thin, Roman lips, nor his fuller, Arabic ones, but enough ran through the current between their dark, dark eyes. No Rizzolis were good with words, but this? The looking, appraising, scrutinizing, and appreciating did all the necessary talking for the family. It flickered between Jane and Frankie at all times.

Between herself and Maura, it blazed. She heard the flames roaring in her stomach, even now, as her mind wandered back to the thought of the medical examiner and her plans. Just where was she? She obviously didn't lie about it being a meeting, but hadn't said exactly what that meant. It ate at Jane's detective consciousness. However, she was not about to run around town after her friend and find out.

She'd have to take some of that frustration out on her brother, poor guy.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: I seem to be shelling out these chapters pretty quick, so here you go. :) I just posted chapter one last night, so make sure to read that if you didn't catch it for whatever reason and you feel interested in this story. I have ten chapters outlined, so this should not be longer than that unless I feel absolutely compelled to write an epilogue. Also, like I said in the summary, Maura will be with an original character for a bit (see chapter one's author's note for details). If that's not your thing, no judgment here, but you probably don't want to continue. Rizzles is most certainly endgame, but there will be a journey before that happens. Happy reading, and let me know what you think!**

* * *

"Maura, you came."

The Medical Examiner surveyed not only the stocky young man who said her name, but the room he seemed to own. The light within proved worse than the light in the hall. Here, in this space that reminded her of the offices of her old professors at BCU, only three lamps, one in the corner by a window, one on an endtable between two armchairs against the far wall, and one on the oak desk the man had emerged from behind. The spartan floor sported only one maroon rug under the large piece of furniture in the center of the the room. She glanced to the one window that she had noticed earlier, with its blinds drawn all the way shut. There was no way of knowing if she could escape through it – was it bolted? Welded shut? Affixed with bars on the outside? This place vaguely reminded her of a prison, so it would not surprise her. No, it seemed that her escape from the room would have to rely completely on her intelligence and the temperament of the man who stood before her.

She thought he had fair hair and blue eyes and that he could not have been any older than she, but she could not tell, since not even the light of the moon was let in. He wiped his bearish hands on the front of his khakis before holding one out to her, and she took it lightly, shaking no more than no less than was necessary. He smiled, to one side and close-mouthed, at her decorum, the first darkness she had seen from him yet. Until that second, he had appeared harmless: a little drab, a little, well, normal, uninspiring, but nice, and polite enough. The way the curl of his lips brought shadows to the blue in his irises caused a shiver to run down into her gut - fleeting, but still present as he put on his mask of affability again. She thought that he might pass for a customer service agent or manager at any of the run-of-the-mill chain stores in Boston. It made her see Jane's point about criminals: some people have hunches about them, but most people pass them on the street everyday, never knowing any better about their identity or their danger.

_You knew the type of people you would see here, Maura, you knew that there was risk involved in coming. _"You're Daniel, I presume? When I heard that my father specifically requested that I be here, I was also told that you would be my liason," she spoke with gravitas, trying to impose a bit of control over a situation that was so obviously out of hers for the moment. He let her have it. His nod felt deferential to her.

"Yes, that's me. Daniel Roark. Please, sit, and we'll get started," he motioned to one of the two seats in front of his desk. She obliged. The chairs must have been at least twenty years old, and the wear on the cushion below her said that many people had sat there before. She surmised that most of them were not law enforcement, or employees of the state. But, then again, there she was. One never knew.

It was then that she noticed the body in the chair next to hers for the first time. The body that was very much alive, and very much not Irish. As she trailed up from the men's Prada cap toes up to tailored Versace evening wear, she could have sworn she saw Jane. At least, she thought she saw Jane's lower half: long, defined legs cross at the knee, long, olive fingers laced over the kneecaps. She had barely raised her eyes to the broad shoulders cased in black wool when she heard her name.

"Maura? This is Minerva Portinari. She, uh, has business in the North End. Paddy also requested that she be here. I hope that isn't a problem," said Daniel. He gestured to Minerva from across the desk, but Maura could not be bothered to toss a glance his way. Her eyes were far too wrapped up in the eyes across from her.

Infinitely more dark than Daniel's.

Maura heard her lungs ballooning as every vessel and capillary dilated. Why was she on such high alert? Minerva's long face, punctuated by the perfect bow of her lips and only half a shade darker than Jane's, met her own without reserve. Maura could not fathom, how someone could look you full on and still emit such an aura – an aura of drowning you and pulling you up at the same time.

"Maura... Maura Doyle, is it?" She spoke. Her voice sucked away the tension in the pathologist's back. Her voice, with a hint of an East Coast accent, crept out from behind her teeth and Maura suddenly knew where all the milky darkness in the room had come from. Had there been ten lamps here, it would have made no difference. Minerva Portinari provided shadows with just the timbre of her vocal cords. She and Daniel must have had quite the lengthy conversation before Maura walked in, judging from the dimness of their surroundings.

"No, Maura Isles, actually. I was adopted," she replied finally. She studied Minerva's visage again for a few seconds, resigned to the fact that she couldn't look elsewhere. Framed by shoulder length, thick, straight brown hair that was highlighted with what seemed to be chestnut, the other woman's face called for the utmost attention. Maura noted the ghost of a smile. "but I think you knew that." She chanced some bravado. If she were sitting in this room, then there was no way she could be so clueless to Maura's existence.

Minerva chuckled and readjusted her hands so that they brushed off the front of her black coat. "He said you were smart," she winked and Maura caught a whimper between her teeth before it could escape. "Well, you want to get this over with, Daniel? As you can see, I have an event to attend," gesturing to the suit she wore, the woman nodded to the only man in the room in encouragement.

"Of course. Well, Maura, as you know, your father is in prison. Because of some key testimony, he will be executed soon if he does not win his appeal. But, like any other business, even if the CEO is absent, the company has to accept its losses and move on to someone else. Rest assured, Paddy is well aware of the process and orchestrating the best he can from the inside. But, he requested that you be filled in-"

"Hold on a moment, Daniel. I don't mean to interrupt you, but what it sounds like you're insinuating is that I somehow will be involved in this replacement process," when the Irishman rubbed a hand through his hair and nodded, she continued. "My father said that there were some things for me to sort out in terms of his last will and testament, not that I would be participating in anything of that nature," Maura held up her hands, seeking to wash them of anything major before she encountered it.

Before Daniel could retort, however, Minerva spoke. "Maura. There is no need to worry yourself over who is taking over for your father. Daniel and I will take care of that. But, can I ask you something?" she unfolded her legs, turned toward the medical examiner in her chair, and then leaned forward to rest her elbows on her thighs.

"You may," Maura all but whispered in affirmation. She fiddled with the pendant around her neck, and swallowed. She noted the familiar tingle in her body, the tingle that usually told her that she wanted Jane near. But she also realized that part of her wanted Jane as far as possible when she was looking into Minerva's gaze.

"Why are you here, if you want no part of your father's business?" she asked. Fair point, Maura reasoned, but it still slithered down her gullet like a bitter pill. Could she even answer?

"Because I want my name removed from any parts of his dealings once and for all. If there's anything left that would be tied to me, I came here to find out, and deal with it accordingly," she attempted, at least.

"That's fair," seemingly satisfied, Minerva turned back to Daniel with a smirk. He only nodded to both women before continuing.

"I hate to break it to you Maura, but if that is your intention, we have a lot of work to do tonight," He shrugged as he spoke to her, and she silently appreciated the apology in his tone.

"If I may be so rude to ask, Daniel, if that is indeed the case, why is Minerva here?" Maura inquired. She did not want Minerva to leave, god no, she wanted her to stay as long as possible so that she could study her more, but she suddenly felt a burning need to know. To know more about any potential connection she had to her. Some deep recess of her brain hoped fervently that Minerva was not related to her. Why it did so, she was yet unsure.

"That's not rude, that's a good question," once again, Minerva answered in Daniel's stead. Maura wondered who called this meeting and who exactly was in charge. "Paddy has called on me to take over. He wants me to take his place."

Maura choked and coughed on her own saliva.

Questions blared on the front of her skull. Who is this woman? Since when CAN a woman take over a crime family? Since when could an Italian head up the Irish Mob in Boston, of all places? Was she the only thing standing between Minerva and this new power? Suddenly any part of her that did not want Jane here withered. She needed her protector, her knight, to keep her safe.

"It's true. As of right now, you two, in this room together right now, are the most powerful figures in Boston crime," Daniel handed Dr. Isles a cold bottle of water and Minerva patted her back in concern.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: Well, all, here's another chapter! I'm trying to shell out as many of these as possible before I go on vacation next week. However, we're a third of the way there! Again, just as a reminder, things will heat up between Maura and Minerva before they cool down. If you stick with it and trust me, though, Rizzles is coming! For those of you who reviewed, thank you! I personally respond to each one that I can (obviously that excludes those who reviewed as guests). For my hater posing as many haters, thank you, too! The publicity is great. ;)**

"Mornin, sunshine."

"JANE! Oh my god," at the husky greeting coming down the stairs, Maura jolted, spilling coffee beans everywhere on account of the hand that was holding them had flown up to her chest. "I thought I was alone."

Jane dragged her eyes from the spring time peep toes on Maura's feet up to her flexing calves, until they brushed over the gray suit skirt and flowing magenta blouse embraced by a matching gray blazer. How her friend sexified office chic, she would never know. It complemented her suit perfectly, gray with a deep purple oxford, badge and gun slung low on her hips. They drummed a slow, almost imperceptible clank for each step she took toward the island. "I can see that... by all the coffee beans scattered about."

The medical examiner flushed at Jane's smirk, which lowered her brow and darkened her brown eyes. It could have just been residual tachycardia, but her body's reaction to the dark grin was a thin sheet of moisture. Everywhere. "Why are you here? I would have brought your breakfast to your desk, you know."

"I know," replied Jane. Maura's uncharacteristic sweat unnerved her. She softened her face in response. What had happened last night? Was it really that shocking that she was here? "You didn't call. I got worried, came here with my night bag, and when you were nowhere in sight, I figured I'd wait. You didn't get home until late, and by that time I'd already fallen asleep in the guest bed," she couldn't help the admonishment in her tone. She imagined how this conversation might go the night before, but now, with the sun dancing through the kitchen window and waltzing across Maura's features, she didn't have the heart to be as stern as she'd hoped.

"I'm sorry," the pathologist visibly softened at Jane's account. "I really am, Jane. I just knew it was late and I didn't want to wake you," she smiled genuinely.

"You know I hate that excuse, Maura. I'll wake up," at her friend's lighthearted scoff, Jane paused. She _was _a notoriously deep sleeper. "Well, even if I don't wake up, I would appreciate a voicemail to tell me you're safe when I first get up in the morning." Her eyes turned severe. Worry clouded them.

"You're right. Next time I'll call," said Maura. Jane's display, equal parts vulnerable and territorial, warmed her skin again. She crossed the few feet between them and wrapped her arms around the detective's shoulders, using her hand to push a mane of wild black waves to rest more fully on her shoulder. She swayed them for a moment, hearing the _thumpthumpthumpthump _of Jane's heart steady to the slow blip of a _bump... bump... bump. _The vibrations of vocal cords near her collar thrilled her.

"You gonna clean up those beans? Or you want me to do it?" Jane quipped. With a laugh, they separated.

"I've got it. Just grab the ingredients for your breakfast, please. Green smoothie today with hemp protein. That means kale, so do not just bring me a ton of fruit," Maura instructed.

With a grumble, Jane complied. "It's a heavy lift day, can't I just have an omelette or some sausage at the cafe?" she knew the answer before she spoke her question. Hiding a smirk behind the pile of fruits and vegetables bundled in her arms, her eyes narrowed when she saw Maura pulling out chia seeds and the hemp protein from a cabinet.

"The goal is to build muscle, Jane, not an artery blockage," the good doctor shook her head and grabbed several items from Jane's pile.

"Hey!" the detective yelled, holding up her arm to flex. Her bicep, larger than in months past, made itself known even through the blazer on her shoulders.

Maura made no effort to resist the urge to run her fingers across it. "And while you have done an amazing job in that department, I think you owe no small credit to me. Even you can't deny what eating right has done for you."

Ok, so it hadn't been as bad Jane had once thought, the whole eating healthy thing. Once she realized that she wouldn't be starving herself, just eating a lot of things with names she could hardly pronounce, along with the staples of protein like chicken and salmon and other vegetables that she _had _grown up eating, she actually kind of liked it. She felt like shit less often, had more energy, and was less irritable. Maura definitely benefited from the latter, and she shook her head at her own previous asshole-ishness. She vowed to put those days and those attitudes completely in the past. "Yeah, yeah. Just don't tell anyone, ok? I get enough of the comments from Ma."

"Your mother is very proud of you. She is happy to see you bounce back after a rough time in your life. She was just worried, that's all," Maura waited to finish her sentence, and then blasted the blender through what would be Jane's first meal of the day. "Grab my travel mug when you get your blender bottle, will you? I'm running a little late so I need to get this coffee ready right away."

Jane was way ahead of her, presenting her with her mug and the blender bottle before she finished her request. Morning drinks were poured, keys and belongings were gathered, and finally Jane opened the front door for her friend with a jerk. "Ready to go?"

"Ready," Maura smiled in return, patting her softly on the arm.

They had arrived at the precinct hours ago, said hello to Angela on their way to the elevators, and Jane had even kissed her cheek as she told her to have a good day. It put a tingle into her limbs, but it was nothing out of the ordinary, especially recently. Jane was very demonstrative with Maura, and Maura appreciated it. It really did usually help her to have a good day, knowing a friend like Jane was rooting for her, believed in her.

Despite her early productivity in the morgue this morning, however, her will to work plummeted with each ticking of the clock on her desk; she only counted the moments until lunch would come as thoughts of last night came washing over her consciousness.

_They had spoken for hours, and only now could Maura see real progress._

_ "You're sure you don't want to retain any of this? Not even the couple motels? They're perfectly legal and turn a pretty solid profit," Daniel had removed his Member's only jacket; sweat speckled the back of his polo shirt._

_ Minerva smiled at his question, more because Maura had upturned a manicured eyebrow at than because of its absurdity. The Italian had noticed several enticing things about the pathologist's physique in the past two hours, but her expressive face was by far the most interesting._

_ "They may be legal, but I've worked with law enforcement long enough to know that often what transpires in the rooms is not," Maura stated. She spoke as someone with authority, someone unable to be swayed in her righteousness. It made Minerva want to try._

_ "Let her sign everything away, Daniel. It's what she wants," she waved a nonchalant hand toward the man, who simply shrugged again and settled into a comfortable silence. _

_ The three worked together quietly for long minutes, signing and reading and signing again. Another hour must have past before anyone spoke again. When they finally did, it was Daniel's voice that cut through the air._

_ "Well, that should be everything. We still have to send paperwork through and make sure that Mr. Portinari and his associates accept our terms, but that should be the bulk of the transfer. Now, if you'll excuse me while I make some copies," he said. As he turned to exit the room, Minerva caught his arm, "give me the remaining slips and I'll take care of those," she instructed. He merely nodded, and revisited his task. As the door clicked shut, Minerva turned her long, lean body to look at Maura again. She grinned and the medical examiner struggled to hide a bashful smile in return._

_ "You've made this process a lot less, well, harrowing than I thought it would be," Maura offered in genuine appreciation. She crossed her legs to quiet the unrest that Minerva's toothy grin had sparked between them. "But I still have reservations about you. For god's sake, my father wants you to take over for him."_

_ "Did you expect a Godfather scene?" Minerva raised her eyebrows and Maura had to laugh a little. "Just because he wants me to take over does not mean that I will. My father is the one with all the experience running a crime family; I have none. But, when they both decided to merge in order to get stronger, they took their age into account. I suppose they wanted someone young and I was the one who came to mind. I'm not fit to do any kind of criminal leading, Maura, I just do things of this nature: a financial nature. I hope you didn't expect busted heads and a shootout..."_

_ "Oh, I see," Maura could not hide her twinge of relief. So she was not staring at her father's successor, just another young woman he hoped would follow in his footsteps. "No, I suppose not. I guess I didn't expect it to just take some signing over of rights and some selling of property. It feels more like a meeting with a new accountant," she mused, more to herself._

_ "Well, how about you meet this accountant over lunch tomorrow to finish up?" Minerva pointed to herself. "I'm terribly late to a charity event that I was supposed to be helping to host, so I'm afraid I'll be up much too late to make a breakfast meeting."_

_ Who was this woman, Maura wondered, that had charity events and yet had just bought half of Paddy Doyle's businesses for her "family"? She knew that such a family did not refer to Minerva's blood relations necessarily, but to the men and women that helped run an organized crime entity. Who was she that she offered to finish this in midday? The pathologist thought of saying no, that she preferred not to mix these dealings of the dark with the light of the sun, but she could not pass up a chance to meet Minerva again, to get her questions answered. First and foremost, she was a scientist, and she needed to see if the Italian's gaze affected her as much in the daytime as they did this night. _

_ So, she said, "Yes. That will be fine. There's a cafe by the BPD precinct, called Simple Simon's. Meet me there at noon?" _

_ Minerva rose, and nodded. "I'll see you there, _Principessa_."_

_ Maura had imagined, when she first caught sight of the other woman's legs, that she might be tall. She was not prepared for just how tall. When Minerva stood fully, out of her chair and toward the door, Maura surmised that she was at least an inch taller than Jane. Shoulders broader, skin darker. It was chilling and the medical examiner thanked her own insight for scheduling a lunch where Jane would be near. To protect her from this force. To remind her that she wanted a life of truth and justice, not this life that had suddenly become very appealing._

A buzz to her phone sent her thoughts back to the present. It was her alarm – reminding her of the one thing she had not been able to get off her mind save for this morning with Jane. Time to go meet the man, so to speak.

"Ah, there you are! I was hoping you hadn't thought better of our little rendezvous," said Minerva as she pulled out a chair at their outside table. Not many people crowded the cafe, presumably because of it's fairly concealed location behind a prominent financial building. Secluded enough, but also not hidden. Maura strode out from the inside with her receipt and table tracker in tow, Birkin bag slung over her shoulder. She pulled the sides of her blazer closer together over her magenta top and form-fitting skirt, her gait confident, professional.

When she approached her chair, she whimpered in a bit of defeat. She had practically prayed that the sun would wilt Minerva's somber stare, but there was no such luck. Now in a light gray suit with navy shirt and black tie, Maura acquiesced that she would always feel the pull when she looked at the Italian – she generated her own blackness. The medical examiner sat as to anchor herself for the ride.

"I had work," Maura truth-lied, "but I'm here now. Shall we get started? Before our food arrives?" She removed her sunglasses and smiled sweetly.

Minerva blushed. Noticeably. _Ah, a weakness. _Maura planned to exploit it for all it was worth.

"We certainly can. Sign here, and the sale of most of your father's smaller assets to my father will be complete," said Minerva. She pulled a few folded papers from the pocket inside her suit coat and presented them to Maura, who took note of the glimmering silver ring on the woman's right middle finger.

"Excellent," she responded, and leaned in close, "can I ask you a question?"

Minerva reddened again. It titillated her. She made a note to try and do it as much as possible. "Sure, shoot."

"What is it exactly that you do for your father? Do you work for him or does he work for you?"

Minerva chuckled.

"What?"

"In my father's world, in your father's world, fathers never work for their daughters. Or sons, for that matter," the woman offered. Her smile radiated no contempt, only congeniality. "It just proves to me that you are as innocent as you say."

"I'm in this predicament not because I want to be, Minerva, but because my father, Paddy Doyle, put me here. I didn't ask to inherit all of his assets in the event of his death, and I certainly did not expect the promise of a sale to your family to happen simply with a paper and pen. You are certainly not the mobster I expected do deal with. Though, neither is Daniel, but for entirely different reasons," she stopped speaking as her Avocado pecan vegan sandwich was placed before her. She smirked at Minerva's choice, Turkey pesto on focaccia. _Italian all the way._

"What did you mean, just then? That we were not what you expected, but for different reasons?" the Italian then took a hefty bite, and simply touched her gaze to Maura's, a signal that she was ready to listen, without speaking. So the opposite of Jane, who often filled the space with her musical voice, lilting and booming over half-chewed bites of food.

Maura could not help but feel a little refreshed, and at the same time, like a little piece of her was missing. She dismissed it and answered. "Just that, perhaps I have some essentialist views on those involved in organized crime. Both of you happen to meet some of those, but you two also shatter many more. Daniel, because he is very plain, almost harmless," the word that entered her mind upon seeing him for the first time tumbled out of her mouth, "but you, you shatter my essentialism because I cannot understand you. You mystify me, unlike Paddy, who seems to fit the mobster profile seamlessly," she said before digging in.

"I mystify you, huh? And what is so mystifying about me?" Minerva leaned back, sensing a need to stop being so imposing. So supposedly mysterious. She gave her guest some space.

Maura smiled good-naturedly through a bite. "For example, you donate regularly to the Fenway Clinic. But, your business endangers countless lives, especially through the sale of drugs to homeless youth, many of whom fall within the LGBT spectrum," she did not sound accusatory, but she did sound dry, analytical.

Minerva laughed again. "You do know that I don't sell drugs, right? Or run the Patriarca family? The only hand I have in the merger between your father's entity and my father's, is the exchange and management of legal assets."

"...I'm sorry?"

"I am the accountant for all my father's legal possessions and endeavors. Like I said last night, I'm not a crime boss," Minerva could all but see the pathologist's cortisol levels plummet. What was left was a pleasant hum around her body. The mobster's daughter heard the blood rapids careening around her ears at the sight. "You should know that I just do the books. For all the non-criminal stuff."

"You're... you're his accountant... perfectly legal?" Maura choked out before she could grab her lemon water.

"Well... I'm finding more and more as I get older that 'perfectly' is a relative term, but basically. The funds my father pays me come from his legal businesses and I have a trust fund from my grandfather. Also a mobster."

Maura shuddered with the sudden bestowal upon her of something she did not know she needed so badly: someone to speak with frankly about the trials and tribulations of being a mobster's child. Minerva's sudden change from possible aggressor to potential confidant charged her insides. The blood began to flow southward when she considered the tiny crow's feet at Minerva's eyes, or the slender bow of her lips, for the first time in the light. Her eyes changed from a churning night sea, to an inviting darkness, perhaps the late night black of a beckoning bedroom to a tired inhabitant. However, she had to test the newfound connection: make sure that it would not break before she fully welcomed it. "How do you reconcile, live with it? Knowing you profit from their crimes?"

"Another thing I learned long ago is that life is not so black and white. And that the best feeling is giving a lot of that old money to kids who need it. If I had stayed away and used my degree on my own to find a job, I could not be nearly as helpful as I am now. It helps me sleep at night," the Italian took another bite of her sandwich, the lines near her eyes crinkling when she saw Maura nod.

Their conversation continued inanely for a few more minutes, neither ready to dive back into the line of speech they had just emerged from. Maura signed the paperwork that Minerva had presented her with – she realized as she did so that Paddy did not endanger her job or her life. When he died, she would only have to sign away his legal assets to one Mr. Tommaso Portinari. This preliminary work was the most sinister, saying only that she pledged to do so in the event of Paddy's likely demise. _Our ways have changed, I guess, _Minerva had said earlier, _we use a lot more pen and paper and a lot less lead._

Before she could comment on any of her thoughts, however, a phone buzzed in her bag, stopping Minerva mid-chew.

"Please excuse me," Maura smiled apologetically to the woman across from her, "Dr. Isles."

Minerva's brow lowered and her mouth turned up at the mention of Maura's title. She straightened her posture, fixed her tie, and took a healthy gulp of her ginger ale.

"Yes, I'll be there as soon as I can; I'm about twenty minutes away," Maura finished her call, and just then heard the wail of a siren. It must have been Jane peeling away from the precinct, anxious to get a leg up on traffic. She turned again to Minerva. "I really am sorry, but I've been called away to a scene..."

"Please, go. Your city needs you," quipped Minerva. "But, can I ask you something before you depart?" she inquired, mimicking Maura's earlier question.

"Of course," the medical examiner said as she got up to gather her things and leave a twenty for their food. Minerva waved her off definitively and produced her own wallet.

"Would you meet me for dinner sometime? Say on Thursday?"

Whatever Maura guessed the question might be, that was not it. It stopped her full force; she was surprised that she experienced no whiplash. "Yes. Yes, I would like that," when she finally recovered enough to answer, she nodded and fished in her purse for a pen and scrap of paper. She pulled out a Whole Foods receipt, and scribbled. "Here is my cell phone. Call me to let me know time and dress code."

Minerva flushed yet again when a soft set of fingers touched her forearm in a goodbye.


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N: Hello all, here's chapter four! Just as a reminder, I will be out of town this Monday through Wednesday, so uploading might slow down. I plan to bring my laptop to work on Odio, but I have no idea what the internet situation will be like.**

**I also have a comment: I don't know how you guys are pronouncing Minerva's name in your head, but I thought I'd let you know how the characters in the story are pronouncing it, and that is with a decidedly Mediterranean intonation. So, instead of the anglicized Minerva that we probably hear most often, this one sounds more like _(Mee-NER-vah). _Just an fyi. Anyway, happy reading and let me know what you think!**

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Maura knew as soon as she stepped onto the scene that she would be trading one Italian's fire for another's. When Jane turned toward her, she accepted her fate. Thunderous Sicilian-American steps galloped her way, slowing to a swagger when they both started to make out the details of each other. Jane, looming over her, blazer gone, suffused heat across her body. This familiar heat had increased in intensity since her best friend's body had changed, but she pushed it away under the "Jane is straight" file in her brain.

She really needed to get laid, apparently.

"Where were you, my friend? I went down to the morgue to get you, but you weren't around," said Jane. She laid a hand against the small of Maura's back and led her to the body. Maura felt Dr. Isles creep back into her bones at the sight of the yellow tape.

"I had to take care of some financial things, so I met with an accountant over lunch," this was technically not a lie. And, the weight of being tied to Paddy Doyle had lifted, so she looked up at Jane with glee and a more than a smattering of mischief. Before Jane could ask what the look was for, Maura trotted off to what looked to be a floater pulled up onto the docks.

"Hey! What was that all about?! Maura!" Jane yelled, charging after her friend, eyes trained on the sway of her hips and the pep in her step. She was definitely happy about something. To not tell Jane outright meant one of two things: she didn't know if Jane would share in her happiness, or she wanted something from Jane.

Little did the detective know, it happened to be a mixture of both. Telling Jane about the prospect of a date could go several ways, depending on her mood, and given that Maura had not had a date since the Casey debacle, she had no idea what that reaction might be. Before Casey was in the picture, Jane bristled when Maura dated. Mostly, Maura surmised, because she had terrible taste in men. But she also felt the ripples of jealousy emanating from Detective Rizzoli's power displays around these men. It was something she secretly loved about her knight: no one had felt protective enough of her, or wanted to monopolize her time enough, to become jealous. Jane loved her genuinely then, without shame and without reservation.

While Casey stayed in Boston, while she dated him, the love changed. It didn't lessen, but the demonstrations of it morphed. Jane had no longer roared and railed against the men in Maura's life, but she quietly grumbled, pulled away. She would keep interest in hearing about them for awhile, until they did or said something that rubbed her the wrong way, and then she iced out both them and Maura. While she would not consider that behavior the healthiest, she knew it came from a place of love still. She sensed that Jane no longer felt entitled to comment on Maura's love life because of her relationship with Casey, so she retreated rather than say anything more than a passing statement of dislike.

But how would it be now? Now that Jane had regained so much of her power, power she hadn't wielded since very early on in their friendship? Now that Jane was reborn in a way, frightening and strong? And how would it be now that the potential object of her fancy happened to be a woman? An Italian-American woman at that? Jane knew of Maura's bisexuality – had known for a long time. There existed no tension on that point. Jane, in fact, was very supportive: offering to set Maura up with women she knew several times. Somehow, even Angela had found out and occasionally tried her hand at queer matchmaking.

This was new territory regardless, however. New territory frightened the ultimately very shy doctor. So she needed a little something to cement herself in Jane's love. "See this striation here? Probably from the zipper of his jacket after putrefaction began. The swelling tissue created the pressure that eventually resulted in a tear. I cannot say for certain without testing, but I doubt a weapon was involved in this particular contusion."

"So we're looking at a drowning, then," Jane said, standing near Maura, legs farther apart than normal, with posture straighter than she often had. "You gonna tell me why you're so bubbly this afternoon?"

"Well, positive signs of drowning are hard to come by, but I see no preliminary evidence of foul play here. I'll know for sure when I get him back to the lab, but I'm leaning toward accidental death," Maura batted her eyelashes in play at her friend, knowing full well she was drawing on what little patience reserves the other woman possessed. "I promise I'll tell you if you promise to let me work out with you tonight..."

Jane pulled her head back. She _knew _Maura wanted something. Time to be intentionally obtuse. "You always work out with me."

"No I don't!" Maura pouted, "I always give you your warm-up fuel and stretch you and then I get confined to another part of the gym, the girly part, while you grunt and yell in the weight room!"

Well, shit. She saw right through that defense. "I don't want you to get hurt, Maura," now it was Jane's turn to pout. That at least was mostly true – she really did not want the dainty doctor to hurt herself while working out with her.

"That's ridiculous! You would spot me! I trust you to protect me... please? Is it because you think I'll slow you down?" Maura begged.

Between the watery eyes and soft touch on her bicep, Jane knew she had to lie. She had to lie and she had to suck it up. "No, of course not! I just really don't want you to get hurt. But you know what? You're right. I'll be your spotter; nothing will happen. Let's work out tonight." The sea breeze whistled a sound that sounded strangely like 'whipped', but the detective figured it was her own brain telling her that she bitched out when she also had something to share. She knew that if Maura proceeded to go all vulnerable in the BPD gym, then she would spill the little tidbit of information she had been keeping to herself since ten that morning. She counted the minutes until her inevitable confession.

"Ah, excellent! And then I will tell you what you want to know! You won't regret it!" Maura practically sang. She removed her purple gloves with a smack, signed off on a young man's clipboard, and walked with Jane toward their cars.

Detective Rizzoli bumped Dr. Isles' side playfully then, signifying their all-right-ness, and smiled at the prick of wetness on her clothed shoulder. If getting to be Maura's number one person, and having Maura be hers required a little uncomfortable soul-sharing, then so be it. She would gladly do it everyday.

Maura removed her lips from the matieral and smiled back, "see you there, Detective?"

"Of course."

"So... Dr. Isles," Jane began and approached Maura, who finished up her baseball stitch on the decedent with a proud grin, "do I have to do my gumshoe thing or can we hit the iron?" She left her gym bag in the locker room before coming down, hoping that the answer would be in fact, yes, hitting of iron would be occurring very soon.

"You do not have to do your gumshoe thing, fortunately. I've ruled this man's death an accident. We will finalize everything tomorrow, but for now, I am free!" said Maura, wiggling her eyebrows. "Just let me grab my bag and we can head up to the locker room."

Maura's mood ate at Jane since they had returned from the scene. Did she want to know the mechanics behind that extra spring in her step? Maybe not, but the detective in her would not let it go. Her doggedness defined her, for better or for worse; with Maura it was no different. As the Chief Medical Examiner retreated to her office, Detective Jane Rizzoli closed her eyes to clear her thoughts. She worried also about clearing her own air. She worried about gains. She worried about sustaining an injury that would sideline her training. She had been both careful and lucky thus far, the only problem she had encountered being a sore right quad. Rest and no running for a few days cleared it right up.

Jane considered the body an easy puzzle to solve, especially with Maura, so thinking about it instead of her problems helped her relax. Maura solved her body quickly; merely running a few blood panels and taking a few measurements provided her with enough information to transform Jane's diet and bestow mass on her once-pathetic muscles. Some type of smoothie or shake in the morning, mostly raw food throughout the day before evening, and clean cooked meals for dinner, supplemented by her pre- and post-workout protein brought out the best in her Rizzoli metabolism, made her more Rizzoli than she had been in a long time. Maura did that; her best friend did that. Maura gave her her name back after she didn't hear from Casey, her now ex-fiance. Maura, through science and biology, made Jane, well, _Jane _again. Maura's knowledge of Jane's body gave her a purpose again, no matter how vain or shortsighted that purpose seemed.

How could she ever have even entertained the possibility of leaving her camaraderie, her intimacy, to piss away her life on some army base to be so boringly pounded by some mediocre, abusive, military man? Thank god that that Jane Rizzoli had left the building.

"Let's go," ordered Maura, beaming, ready for a chance to impress. They departed the morgue, pushed the button for one floor up on the elevator, and in seconds they arrived at the BPD gym.

Of course, it paled in comparison to the two, sometimes three floor mega-gyms around Boston, but it was clear that the Police Department liked to take care of its own. More than a few cardio machines littered one corner of the room, and lifting machines filled another, but the pride of the BPD gymnasium was the weight room in the middle of it. It was small, not anything imposing by visual standards, but Maura had watched Jane kick more than a few asses in it. Their sweat and defeat might still be tattooed to the center floor. Sparring at work proved anthropologically fascinating to the scientist: there were many scuffles at work, more specifically, here in the gym, but they were never intervened upon unless someone got _really _hurt. It was a way for the cops to settle scores and squash beef, if one had been disrespected or called out.

Being that Jane was the youngest to be promoted to the rank of detective, and that she was a woman, no less, confrontation flocked to her. Being a Rizzoli, she didn't shy away from it either. So, while it happened often, Maura never voiced her disapproval, letting her knight have her outlet, knowing that many times her own honor needed protecting and that was what sent Jane to box some sexist asshole in the middle of her workplace.

This Jane, though, striding through that gym toward the women's locker room, exuded a quieter aura than the Jane that stepped up to her and Maura's detractors. Deadliness wafted off of her in a way that had not before, but this Jane also had a genteel side to her. Like as though with her new confidence, her new awakening, she realized that she could be less like a hurricane and more like a virus.

"Today I'm working out my core," said Jane to the musing medical examiner behind her. "You ok with that?"

"Yes, I am. I'll follow your lead," Maura said seriously. She watched Jane turn the corner, and they entered the locker room.

Detective Rizzoli pulled open a locker with her name on it, and thrust her bag on the wooden bench in front of it. She stood there a moment, a little lost in thought and a little burdened by the talk she knew was to come, and by the time she came to and turned around, Maura had already shrugged on her teal tank top and charcoal yoga pants. The only things missing were her shoes, which sat on the bench next to Jane's bag.

"You went somewhere else, just now," the doctor pointed out. "Are you alright?" She crossed over to her friend and unclipped the badge and weapon from her belt. She would have undressed Jane and redressed her in an instant, but knew Jane would not be comfortable with that. Maura hadn't ever really had a close friend before, or someone to be truly intimate with in any capacity, so her actions often came off as awkward or boundary-pushing. She hypothesized that Jane might not even be okay with what she had just done.

That is, until she watched Jane's eyes flutter closed and her breathing slow at the weight of Maura's hands on her hips – definite signs of relaxation. The pathologist thanked whatever deity existed that their intimacy had reasserted itself recently; she needed her best friend and confidant again. Jane's run with Casey damaged more than she initially thought, and it was little moments like these that made her believe they were on the mend again. That worried her as well, in a way: now she really had no idea how Jane might react to her dinner with Minerva. However, she couldn't put it off for much longer, at the risk of hurting the best thing that had happened to her.

"I did. I'll be fine though, I promise," replied Jane, jerking herself back into reality with the unbuckling of her own belt. She kicked off her boots at the same time, smiling, and Maura felt herself grow a little taller. The detective changed quickly, staring at Maura for a long while before deciding that they should move out.

That stare always bound Maura up in knots. She couldn't run from it anymore. She didn't want to. She wanted it to know all of her. Wanted someone to know all of her, to share in it. "So, I have news," she began, reddening a bit with her nervousness.

Jane's stomach plummeted. Call it gun shy from her own pregnancy test, but news of a baby was the only thing she could think of that Maura was about to say. Her thoughts softened a bit when she envisioned a tiny Maura running about, entering their lives, but then they turned sharp again when she imagined the ugly asshole she might call Dad. She shook her head to rid herself of it all, but Maura took it as a nod to continue.

"Remember that accountant I told you about? We are going to have dinner on Thursday night," Maura said. Her words came out rushed, in fear that she would bottle them up again if they did not slide past her tongue.

Jane exhaled in audible relief. _Just a date, _she smiled internally. The smile, her pure euphoria at having been wrong in her initial guess, spread to her mouth and to Maura's heart. "Oh yeah? What's the lucky guy's name?" She called over her shoulder as she locked her stuff away and led them back out to the gym. There were one or two stragglers over on the cardio machines, but on a Tuesday evening, she and Maura were the only ones dedicated enough to still be at work.

"Not a he," Maura practically bounced behind her, _this was going very well so far._ "A female accountant. Her name is Minerva," she decided to omit the tiny tidbit that Minerva happened to have some ties to Mafia, given that Jane would only get angry and then have absolutely nothing to arrest her on.

The feeling in Jane's stomach returned again, only now merely an echo compared to the boom it was. She couldn't place why knowing the sex of Maura's date had an outcome on how she felt about it, but she stuffed that away to analyze later in order to show her friend some support. "Ah. You know, this is the first woman you've dated since we've become friends. She must be special," she winked and lowered herself to the floor so that the doctor could stretch her legs.

Maura delighted hugging one of Jane's firm, strong legs to her body as she bent and twisted the muscles, unashamedly happy at the warmth that told her that Jane was very much alive and well. After witnessing a few of the detective's near-death experiences, any sign of health and life pleased her greatly. She felt a hamstring bulge against her belly as she leaned forward, smiled at her proximity to Jane's face in such a position, and then felt the muscle retreat when she pulled back again. She switched to the other leg and repeated her movements, taking in the scent of her friend's sweat and body wash. Jane smiled back at her, they shared a moment, and then she moved away. It was a routine she hoped never to break, not only for her own enjoyment but for the fact that Jane hated stretching on her own and was unlikely to do it if not forced.

"I don't really know her that well," Maura finally responded, and Jane heaved another sigh of relief masked as a deep breath, "but I am intrigued by her. She is sexy; she has a very masculine aura, like you, though not as pronounced as yours."

Jane huffed at the suggestion that she was manly. She went to grab a weighted ball and returned back to sit up position. Maura held her feet. "Oh, I hope you don't take offense to that, Jane. Being masculine and feminine is a very desirable thing," she winked as Jane began to count fifty sit ups with the ball over her head and then up to her knees. At least she was listening. "She dresses more in a more androgynous manner than you, but she's softer, too. She, I don't think, could ever be as protective or loyal as you," with a finality to the action, Maura grabbed Jane's face by the chin and minutely shook. The affection broke Jane's pout and she grinned.

"So not as hot as me, huh?" She laughed when Maura swatted her. "Alright, alright. But seriously, what does she look like?" The talk kept Jane's mind busy as her obliques burned. Soon she could take a break and spot Maura.

Maura had intended to answer, but her eye caught Jane's abdominals contracting, curling twisting with effort. They certainly had not been this pronounced the last time she had seen them this close. Her pupils collapsed and then ballooned; she resisted the urge to touch them. Then she remembered Jane was waiting on her to answer. Shit. "Uh, well... like you. She's maybe an inch or so taller, and a little leaner. She seems more like a runner than a lifter."

Jane thrilled at Maura's words with a visceral push. Her workout went into overdrive, and she finished strong. It again confused her. It confused her because Maura had just admitted that she was about to go out with someone who looked like her. Another feeling to dissect in the privacy of her own home and with a few beers. "Well, I hope you enjoy yourself, Maur. You deserve it," she huffed. The doctor patted her in thanks, and they moved through their circuit with relative quiet, Jane knowing that if she talked too much more, then she would spill in a way that would end up biting her in the ass later.

Maura hung pretty well with her throughout, she only had to modify one or two workouts. Jane ate her previous words with little complaint, and resolved to involve Maura in the actual working out part more often. Because she did deserve it. More than just a good love life, a good date, she deserved people who lifted her up, took care of her, and spent time with her. She hadn't been that person when Casey was around, and that tore her up. She had to choose honesty this time. She had to choose transparency and love.

That's why, when they made their way back to the locker room, sweatier than before and a little more tired, she said it. "Casey e-mailed me. I got it this morning a couple hours after we got here."

Maura dropped the hand towel that had just wiped sweat at the back of her neck. She didn't even bother to pick it up. Instead she almost whispered. "And?"

See, Jane knew this was going to be the hardest part of this conversation. "He says he'll be here in a couple weeks on leave. He wants to talk."

"And?" Maura simply repeated. Crossing her arms.

Jane knew she had every right to be annoyed, but her annoyance made Detective Rizzoli feel defensive. "What do you mean, 'and'? That's all he said Maura."

"And you would not be telling me any of this if you had decided to do the sensible thing and just ignore that man's advances. I know you. So what did you decide to do?" the pathologist grabbed her bag and slung it over her shoulder, not bothering to make sure Jane was following. She was.

"I haven't decided yet," Maura's point deflated her response. "Look, Maura," Jane turned her friend around with a touch and winced at the hurt in her eyes, "I'm not gonna fall back into his arms or some shit, okay? He just wants to talk, because neither of us really got closure."

"That's because he never responded to your e-mail or the letter you sent him with his ring! You tried! He didn't! And now he wants to talk? Now that it's finally convenient for him?!" Maura raised her voice, and Jane looked around for any potential eavesdroppers. Anything to avoid withering under the fire of Maura's gaze.

"I know, I know, ok? I know he's been an ass, Maur. I know. But you gotta just let me do my thing, let me think about this for a bit. I promise you'll be the first to know about anything, and I promise it's not gonna end up in us getting back together," She offered her arm, but Maura did not take it. "Please, Maura? I promise. It's going to be different. If I do decide to go see him, it won't be because I want to get back with him. Just trust me?"

Maura couldn't argue with that. She trusted Jane completely, especially if Jane made the effort to voice her need for that trust. She grabbed the detective's hand, squeezed it, and led them toward the parking garage. Whatever happened, she supposed they would face it together.


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N: Hello! Here we are, dear readers, at the halfway point of _Odio_. I'm not sure when my next post will be because I am going out of town for the next few days. I hate to leave you guys here, at this point, but I guess that's how it goes. Chapter 6 will definitely begin our rizzles descent, however! Let me know what you all think in the meantime. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to read; I really do appreciate it.**

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"Dr. Isles... Yes, I'm just about ready. Would you like to come a little early? Watch me freshen up?" Maura Isles' professional facade dropped as soon as she heard the milky voice on the other end of her phone. Minx Maura, flirty Maura came out to play, and she bit her lip in anticipation of a response. When she finally got an affirmative, she assumed after Minerva had gotten over her blush enough to speak, she cooed her affectionate goodbye and resumed putting her shoes on at the end of her bed.

* * *

Their first date had gone swimmingly. An apt adverb, she mused, considering how aroused she had been. In the two weeks since, they'd seen each other seven times, either for a run, or a lunch, and once a matinee movie. This was their first dinner since. Maura prayed the carnal charge that electrified their last evening affair returned in full force. She'd been ready to go _very _far with her new accountant friend that night, but Minerva stopped anything before it went beyond the point of return. Maura attributed the fact that she still considered it a wild success to Minerva's surprisingly sweet nature, and lost herself in the replay of the night.

_"I hope this place is ok. I realize now, as we walk through the door, that you might be tired of Italian, given what you've said about having it all the time," Minerva, again in a black suit, white shirt, and black tie, pulled out a chair for her stunning date. Maura watched her, studied her eyes, still brown pools of storm, but tamer now. Perhaps it was just the soft candlelight or the dim lamps of the Italian restaurant they found themselves in, but they lacked the dangerous edge they had held at their first meeting with Daniel present. She took the seat, nodding in thanks, and set her purse at her side._

_ "I don't think I could ever tire of Angela's cooking," she started as she unfolded her napkin into her lap, "she's Jane's mother and she lives with me, remember I told you on the phone?" With Minerva's slight affirmative, she continued. "And besides, hers is more of a Sicilian-American style cuisine. Every once and awhile I crave more standard Italian fare."_

_ Minerva welcomed the reassuring touch on her forearm. She had done well in picking this place. The night before, they spent almost two hours on the phone, when originally the accountant had only called to confirm their plans. They talked mostly of their childhoods, and what it meant to be the adult child of a mobster. Maura also talked heavily of Jane, whom Minerva came to see as a very important person to the medical examiner. Maura herself was thankful for the call; she had gotten to know her date just a bit better before they arrived at the restaurant. _

_ It did nothing, however, for the effect of seeing her again. _

_ She paid rapt attention to everything Maura said, running a few fingertips over her lips, thin and rosy. Her crow's feet unfurled as she looked at the pathologist in deep concentration. Her face, kind but regal, reminded the doctor of a map: familiar, yet with so much undiscovered potential. Every face had undeniable similarities to others, but it was so worth exploring the individual terrain of this one. _

_ And Maura wanted to explore. She wanted to use her thumbs to soften the lines of Minerva's forehead, the same ones that ran across Jane's brow, but that she had never been allowed to touch. Her eyes were quickly becoming a favorite attribute, dark but focused only on Maura. Her nose, long and Roman, served as a pointer, a marker, much like Rome itself: look South, it said. To lips, to shoulders. To hips. Suddenly her hands ached with the desire to touch skin. With only Minerva's hand in reach, she decided that it would have to do. She stroked it, ran a thumb against curled fingers like she would a mandolin, and delighted when finally, after what had seemed like years, the hand squeezed hers back. _

_ Minerva looked around, face a mix of disbelief and disapproval. Then she looked at Maura, deadly in her black dress, red heel combo. Ten times deadlier than herself."What's wrong?" asked Maura, who picked up on the irritation on Minerva's features._

_ The mobster's daughter actually chuckled, and waved it off as a passed moment. "Don't they see you?" She gestured discreetly to the other patrons close to their table, "Eyes should be following your every move. Even if it's just the way you drink your water or run a finger through your hair." _

_ The words bypassed Maura's brain, shot straight through her stomach, and blazed in the skimpy lace undergarments she had chosen more for herself to feel sexy than to show to her date. Now she wondered if she might do just that. "Maybe they should. But I think they see you and know to keep their stares to themselves," she finally replied._

_ Minerva straightened her back and scooted her chair forward a bit more. "I am attracted to your confidence," she stated, without elaboration._

_ At that Maura hesitated. Years ago she would have wondered if her statement would have been off-putting to a new love interest. Certainly to some men she would still think twice of saying something similar, even today. She wondered now if she had said something so bold before, would she have even believed it. Before Jane. Jane made her this self-assured. Without Jane, she knew she had beauty, she knew she was intelligent, but Jane forced her to _own_ those things. Jane reminded her of them everyday, until they became not just simple truths of her identity, but something to flaunt, something to take pride in. They were traits that transfixed Jane, and that bestowed upon Maura a confidence she had never known before. Having the power to subdue, to attract someone like her best friend, and having someone like her best friend revel in the capture worked wonders for her self-esteem. Even though the compliments stopped coming when Casey came around, they had picked up again in recent days. It bolstered her, gave her strength to face the day. She made a mental note to thank the brunette for it later._

_ They ate, both satisfied enough by the food, but neither really dwelling on it. Minerva grabbed the check again, saying that when Maura asked _her _out, she could pay. When Maura called her on her assumption that they were going to go out again, she blushed. That did not help quell the charge in the pathologist's veins. Being helped into her light coat before they stepped outside to Minerva's car aroused her even further, so that by the time they reached her doorstep to say goodnight, she had to remind herself not to start unzipping her dress._

_ "I had a wonderful time, Dr. Isles," Minerva said with mirth, as Maura grabbed onto the standard notch lapels of her suit coat. The act drew their bodies flush; the inferno between them blocked out the spring nighttime chill. She knew if she wrapped her arms around the smaller woman in front of her, she might not make it out alive, and she tried valiantly to care._

_ "So did I. You are easy to talk to, and sexy. Talking enough is hard for me, and finding someone hot to do it with is harder," Maura said through a simper. "But I'm done talking."_

_ She was not done smiling. When she pulled Minerva in for a kiss, hot, wet, and lazy, the accountant could still feel her red lips upturned. Their mouths rowed together, and Maura slipped a laugh-moan through her date's teeth and onto her tongue. They were her first, second, third romantic kisses since Dennis. With all that had transpired between her and him, this kiss, these kisses, felt like intercourse itself. Soft, tiramisu tinged, and ultimately safe. In that moment, she tugged Minerva toward the open door, but was stopped. She whimpered._

_ "If I step through that door, we are not going to stop," Minerva stated. She broke their embrace though it seemed to physically pain her._

_ "Exactly," Maura replied. She tried again, but hands reached for her wrists and lips kissed each palm, one then the other. _

_ "And I don't want that yet. I mean, I do, just look at you," Minerva stopped to appraise the heaving tops of breasts and parted, swollen lips. She imagined another pair that might look exactly the same... "but I want to make sure I do this right. Because I like you. I like being around you and I don't want to fuck that up by, well, fucking. Not just yet."_

_ Even the profanity slithered around Maura's most sacred, secret place. She wanted it, bad. But she also had to grin at the sentiment. It was sweet. "I can respect that. I mean, I also respectfully disagree, but that might just be because I am aroused. Kiss me goodnight?"And that she did. Minerva then waved to her as she retreated toward her towncar, and Maura waved back. _

_ Time to try the cold shower Jane had said worked wonders with sexual frustration._

Two weeks later, and the two were officially an item – without sealing the deal. She chuckled out loud as she fixed the strap to her heel - Jane had called them M&M when she heard the news (Maura still couldn't quite figure out if that was disappointment or indigestion on her detective's features when she told her about herself and Minerva). Tonight, in order to celebrate their infant exclusivity, Minerva had suggested dinner and dancing.

Apparently, she loved dancing. Well, from what Maura could gather, she rather enjoyed being danced _on. _And that, the medical examiner could do, if it meant transporting her new woman from the dance floor to her bed. Dismay was not quite the right word for her feelings about their chastity, but she certainly felt a certain... anxiousness. Minerva wanted her, but then again, so did most people. It came with the territory of her glamour. Usually, potential lovers fell away when her personality made its first true appearance; even though she had good friends, her awkwardness and tendency to spout facts in new situations turned pursuers off. Not so with her new suitor. Thus it was uncharted territory for Maura: Minerva wanted her, and had stuck around enough to see the sides of her that many found less appealing, but had not slept with her. What was her tipping point? They both wanted it, and now she had to find a way to get it to happen, because she really missed bathing in warm water.

A ring to her doorbell startled her out of her reverie. _Speak of the devil_. With a quick trot down the stairs and into the main breezeway, she smoothed a hand over her red dress, the same shade that sent a shiver down her date's spine their first night together. With a sure, but moist, hand, she turned the nob.

Minerva stood there, on the other end, and Maura tingled with the infant spark. _Devilish indeed, _she choked out, unsure if it was out loud or still within. Ms. Portinari complemented her with a deep red shirt, collar and tie as black as her Prada shoes. A suit coat, tailored, slim, hugged her lean frame, and Maura envied it in that moment, all but cried out in jealousy at it when the date in question produced one single red rose to her. The flower, coupled with the gaze trying so desperately to catch hers as it snaked back up, told her everything that she needed to know.

It would be tonight.

"Hi," the accountant laughed softly, her own word of greeting a sign that eased her mind – the sight of Maura, every way her complement in red and black, _hadn't _left her dead. Yet.

"Why tonight?" the medical examiner could not be bothered with decorum when presented with the knowledge that soon she would just _be naked _with someone else. A tall, dark, Italian. Must she wade through pleasantries when she already had to go through the whole night just to get to the place she really wanted to be?

"Because I can't wait anymore," Minerva replied honestly.

"That is an excellent answer. Grab my coat before I decide to skip dinner and dancing altogether."

Maura had never danced like that before. Did it even qualify as dancing? Her hips had smoothed the wrinkles on Minerva's pants, Minerva's breath was so close to her ear; a lip wetly punctuated each whispered word against the shell. Of course, Maura had tangoed with senators, waltzed with Frenchmen, and even swing danced with boys in her rebellious college years. But she really had never gyrated that way, with strong hands plastered on either side of her, guiding her, kneading like they needed to burn through her clothes and anchor themselves to her skin. She had to remind herself that soon, soon they would be doing a much different kind of dance.

Soon turned to now as they currently were storming through the medical examiner's front door. The same hand that ignited a fire on the skin of her right hip wanted to play, its fingers swirling grasping, caressing until they curled into the warm flesh of Maura's breast. She let out a sharp breath into Minerva's mouth at the touch, rubbing her own fingers over the hand to make it stay. Could it really have been over a year since she had been touched this way? Her mind drowned with the possibilities of what they might do.

The unmistakable _click _of her zipper trickled down her spine, yet gushed between her legs. She bit her lip in between kisses to keep from crying out in frustration: Minerva was currently marching her up the stairs, and having to take each step backwards made her _so slow_. She wanted to beg her date to just carry her the rest of the way, but that would be unfair. She knew she couldn't. Couple that with her task of unbuttoning the accountant's very expensive shirt, and she was half convinced she was in a nightmare, burning with no chance of quenching the flame.

Then Minerva groaned, the rumble resonating in Maura's ribcage, Maura who tired of waiting. Maura who refused to wait anymore. She snagged Minerva's hand and all but ran them up the few remaining stairs and into her sanctuary.

"We'll get there Maura, I promise, just slow it down a little," the Italian cooed against champagne hair, holding her close, forcing her to take a few breaths. When all those breaths engulfed her in faint cologne, however, she needed to speed up. Minerva smelled like fruit and the beach after a rain, and Maura had always wanted to make love on a beach. When the accountant's belt buckle released with a _pop—pop_, they both looked down and then back at each other.

"If you could see the way you're looking at me, you would know why I don't have any patience," with one predatory glare, she slipped a surgeon's hand underneath the waistband of black boxer briefs.

Brownblack eyes raged in arousal. Maura, for a moment, felt fear soak her bones. Then, something else entirely soaked her own underwear, before it went the way of her dress: tossed toward the closed bedroom door. Minerva undressed the both of them, and Maura barely had time to walk back to the mattress before they were horizontal. The pressure against her, skin on skin, felt light, almost too light. She grasped at Minerva's back, dragging nails onto her olive complexion, hungry for more heat, more weight on her starved body. She kissed deeper, nipped harder, to make her intentions known.

With a slick release of the medical examiner's lower lip, Minerva's mouth sucked a hot trail to a nipple, waiting, almost painful in its hardness, a beacon seeking out the supple cushion of a tongue-lip combination.

"Ahh..." moaned Maura, hands still gripping, hips seeking a thigh to grind against, anything to relieve the tension in her. It coiled deep in her belly, like a prayer she ached to utter, but dared not own in case it went woefully unanswered.

But her date, her lover, aimed to please. Long, curled fingers entered her, making her believe again. Two of them settled inside, learning her walls, her oceanic peaks and valleys, stroking the shakes out of her.

"Fuuuccckkk..." Minerva grunted at the sensation, collapsing onto Maura's front with a sigh. She linked their foreheads and pulled at the doctor's lips with her own.

"Finally, huh?" Maura giggled in response. She lolled her head back against her pillow, legs rising to wrap around a slim waist, hands kneading shoulders and biceps. "Ohh..." she gasped at a third finger unexpectedly slipping in. She debated telling Minerva that she wouldn't hurt her if she tried to destroy her. They could try lovemaking later, right now she wanted to be demolished.

But a loud _CLANG _in the kitchen stopped them both dead.

"What the hell?" Minerva turned to look back at the closed door and then at Maura again, who strained to listen. More banging and stomping, hurried, imposing, filled what sounded like the living room.

Again, fear grabbed Maura, so she grabbed onto the woman on top of her. "Angela is on vacation..."

Immediately Minerva's gaze darkened and her brow turned hard. She pecked the mouth in front of her, it kissed her back, and then she stood. Maura felt the loss, and pulled up the covers around her because of the sudden cold. "You have a gun up here?" She wondered at the cold voice seeping out of the woman who was tugging all of her clothes back on, who had been so soft with her moments earlier. Another loud clanking noise reminded her why. Of _course _she would be robbed on her first night of intercourse in over a year.

"No, but there are a couple of softball bats behind my dresser," she said, pointing to the dresser in question. Minerva shoved on her pants and nodded, keeping one for herself and handing one to the woman on the bed. "Stay here, alright? I have some experience with this stuff. Chalk it up to an eccentric childhood," she winked in order to diffuse some of the fear glistening around Maura's eyes, but she also had to be real. Very real. "If for some outlandish reason something happens and they come up here, have 911 ready to go and absolutely do not hesitate to beat the fuck out of them."

When Maura nodded to show she understood, the accountant slithered down the staircase, choked up on the bat, and was ready to swing when she saw a wiry, sportswear clad Sicilian-American detective pouring protein powder into a blender along with some banana and what looked like peanut butter. _This must be Jane._

"Ahem..." she cleared her throat, and lowered the bat in truce, but had no such luck

"Ah! Who the fuck are you?!" Jane yelped at being surprised, expecting to see Maura but getting an eyeful of 5'11 Minerva Portinari in evening trousers and and a white tank top, hands high, one holding the knob of an aluminum.

"Minerva, Minerva Port-"  
"Jane!" Maura bounded around the corner behind her, cutting off her date and shoving her satin robe closed. "We thought you were a burglar!"

"I'm sorry, I forgot my protein, I just was gonna make a shake and head out," Jane replied sheepishly, but even as Maura's words admonished, a light danced in her hazel eyes. The detective eyed Minerva again, and held out her hand for a shake. "Sorry about that, Jane Rizzoli."

Minerva noted the iron of her grip, and matched it. "Don't worry about it, it's fine," she smiled broadly despite the lie. She liked Jane, she really did, at least from how Maura described her. And maybe it would have been fine if she hadn't just been deep inside a rather stunning medical examiner.

A medical examiner who approached Jane with a bicep squeeze and a closed-mouth grin, acting as though they had not been in the throes of passion moments earlier. The unfolding scene fascinated her.

"Let me get it, you relax. Did you just get home from the gym?" asked Maura, moving around the kitchen in a waltz, foiling hurricane Jane.

"Yeah, Frost and I had to prep for a court day next week, so I couldn't make it in until later," Jane replied. She did exactly as Maura told her: with two hands against the counter of the island, she visibly deflated and watched the doctor work.

Maura struggled on her tip toes to reach some vanilla extract to sweeten the shake. "What did you decide about Casey?" Her robe, short already, began to hug her ass with her exertion, both Jane and Minerva stared. The accountant stayed transfixed, glued to the floor, mind still swamped in oxytocin, and Jane glared at her blatant gawk, and moved in.

"You still really don't know how to do small talk, do you?" by the time she registered that Maura had asked a very personal question, her body had already aligned flush with the medical examiner's backside – conveniently covering it. The doctor's body hummed with delight at the heavy press of Jane against her, and she chalked it up to preexisting arousal. Her chest sang when Jane's fingers took hers and wrapped them around the just-out-of-reach vanilla bottle. When her best friend leaned forward into her as she landed back on her heel, she almost forgot that the detective had been deflective.

"I suppose not. Why don't you both sit and I'll make some tea after I blend this, since I need to make sure you finish it all," Maura offered. She knew there was no need to monitor Jane's intake, she would consume all of her shake without policing, but something compelled her to keep Jane around, as it always did. No matter the inconvenience, no matter the reason, more time could always be spent between them.

And after Casey, Jane never disagreed. "Yes, Ma," she teased, but took down two saucers for tea anyway. "But no, I still haven't decided if I'm going to see him. He got delayed apparently; he'll be in next week." When she finished putting on the kettle, she took a seat by Minerva at the table. The Italian, silent for most of the Rizzoli-Isles exchange until that moment, spoke.

"Boyfriend doing you wrong?" she asked. She leaned back into her chair, eager to know more about the enigma before her. Clearly, she and Maura loved one another, but their interactions made the accountant a mixture of hot and jealous. She needed more context.

"Somethin' like that. He's come calling for me after a few months of good ol' silent treatment," Jane said. Normally she would not be so open-mouthed, but if she needed to give a little to get a little, so be it. One look at Minerva and she knew she was softer, more refined than Maura was used to. She just wanted to know what made her special enough to be in her bed and in her heart so soon.

Minerva sensed the standoff between them. And smirked internally at Jane's obvious dismissal of her as serious competition. For what she was unsure, but she was sure of one thing: her own prowess. Unlike her girlfriend, she had a childhood steeped in social puzzles, some thousands of words signifying nothing and some simple gestures speaking volumes into existence. It bolstered her for the coming volley. "Mmm. Sounds like a deadbeat. You're still thinking of seeing him?" at that, Maura had to hide a wicked grin from the kitchen. _Minerva, you can do things to Jane that I could only dream of doing. Please be gentle._

Jane waited for the whir of the blender to cease before answering. "It's a little more complicated than that," she bristled, immediately self-defensive. "He and I were engaged, I thought I was pregnant with his kid."

"Jesus, and he can't be bothered to give you a call?" Minerva was genuinely stunned at that one. If either Italian looked over to the kitchen, they would see Maura nodding vehemently.

They, however, did not, so she spoke to make herself reknown. "No, apparently he cannot. He strung Jane along for months like this before without so much as a peep, then decided, after recovering from major spinal trauma, that she would love a visit and a romp to get reacquainted."

Detective Rizzoli spun around in her seat so fast that her head had to catch up, but when it did, Maura swore it was the nastiest glare she had ever received from her. The one that said _why are you telling this to anyone, let alone a stranger? _But it was too late. Minerva had heard. And what she said next made Maura glad that she had.

"He sounds like a little boy. Obviously, Jane, I don't know him and I don't really know you, but in that case you just have to let someone like that go," she leaned forward again as soon as she saw that she at least had Jane's attention, "You can't raise a man, Jane. If his _mamma _couldn't do it, what makes you think you can?"

The detective did not lash out, did not flip tables or chairs, did not storm out. That was the miracle. She simply nodded and shrugged her shoulders. Maura wanted to hug her for it, but she was carrying a shake and trying to keep her robe from slipping, so she settled.

"Here, drink this, and quickly, please. You'll start to lose progress if you wait any longer," she said, holding out the glass. She wrapped one arm around her Jane's shoulders and pressed a kiss to her temple, then left to fix the tea.


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N: OMG y'all, I'm finally back. I went on vacation, and then caught a stomach bug that KNOCKED ME ON MY ASS. Like fever and dehydration on my ass. However, I was finally able to get well enough to finish chapter six! It's short, kind of a plot mover, but I hope you enjoy. :) And, if I haven't said this yet, thank you for reading. You guys really make my day.**

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"I hated it, Frankie," Jane said through clamped teeth, milliseconds before plunging her tongue into a cold brew. Her teeth glistened against the glass of her pint, canines clanking. Her severe features reminded Frankie of the time his mother had taken him to the zoo in the summertime, and he'd watched the biggest lion pace in front of the smudged glass.

"Yeah, I knew somethin' was eatin' at you," He said, chuckling nervously and smiling in the way that softened all of his Sicilian features, "the way you tackled that runner to the ground today... Jesus. Remind me never to get on your bad side."

She _had _taken down a suspect today, maybe a little rougher than necessary. She bristled at the memory of the puny guy darting in the other direction as soon as he saw the detectives approach the counter at his deli. "Yeah well, he deserved it," she countered, and then, almost under her breath, "you know what the worst part was?"

"What?" Frankie asked. _Were they talking about what she hated, or the suspect? _

"I pictured Minerva when I took his ass out," with another swig, Jane reminded Frankie why she was the original Rizzoli: her smile raised his blood pressure with its equal parts conspiratorial and self-anguishing. It folded the lines of her face, made her older. It should have made her smaller, too, but she grew – the fact that _Jane Rizzoli _was an force that amazed him because it was contained in this one, young, strong, body in front of him. He was charming, Tommy was brash and sexy, but she _was. _

"That's what you hated?" He could only inquire in return. She had gathered the courage to call him up for a drink and talk at The Dirty Robber; she needed to do most of the talking or she would bolt out the front door.

"Well yeah, that sucked, but I was talking about that night I practically caught them, you know," she explained. Her hands gestured vaguely around her midsection, veins pulsing blue against her skin, but even her fingers couldn't bring themselves to discuss it.

"I gotta say, Janie, I don't really get it," Frankie said. He nodded his head in sympathy for her frustration, but continued. "They seem happy to me. I mean, I don't really care if Minerva's happy, but Maura seems happy to me."

"She is happy, brother. She really likes Minerva, from what I can tell. She says they have fun together," said Jane. Her eyes drooped. Her grip tightened. Her beer drained. There was the lion again, her mane falling toward her brow.

"Then why? Why do you want to beat the shit out of the person that makes Maura happy?" Frankie asked. He was honestly curious. He hadn't seen Jane this hung up on something so straightforward since, well, ever. The setting sun came in through the window near their booth, and hit his sister's knuckles, highlighting the various scrapes she'd sustained earlier. A realization smacked him full in the face.

It had apparently smacked Jane between this morning and now because she didn't even blink at his question. "I'm still figuring that out, Frankie. She's not a serial killer, at least, right?" Detective Rizzoli laughed, the lilt in her voice quiet, weak. Thank God the din of the bar and grill drowned out their conversation for anyone else to hear.

"You wanna know what I think?" Frankie asked. His sudden clarity had emboldened him, but he was not about to just come out with it. Jane did not answer, only leveled her gaze at him, but he could see the permission to continue in her eyes. He took a singular breath, let it roll through his lungs and then his veins, and then he drank from his beer. "I think _you _like Maura."

"Of course I like Maura. She's my best friend," said Jane. She blushed behind the rim of her glass.

"Don't be stupid, Janie. You know what I mean," Frankie admonished. The _clunk _of his sister's drink jolted him a bit. He supposed it could have gone worse.

She didn't say anything for awhile, just stared at him. Despite her angular Roman looks and his Arabic curvature, he looked like her. They looked like one another. So much so, in fact, she knew that someone who looked that much like her couldn't _not _be right about how she felt, even if she wasn't really sure about it. "Those are dangerous words, and you know I don't say dangerous words unless I feel convicted. But for some reason, it makes me madder that Minerva treats Maura right. Well, maybe not madder, but like a mix of mad and sad."

"Christ, sis, that's some dysfunctional shit. Please tell me you've never told her that."

"Of course not! And a part of me is happy for her, really," Jane said. Her hands flew up in her defense. "That's the part that talks to her."

"But the other part is pissing on her like a lion markin' its territory," Frankie supplied. He smirked when Jane's olive skin tinged itself with rose.

"That's great. Real nice imagery, asshole."

Now it was Frankie's turn to hold up his hands. "But it's true, ain't it? Remember when I liked Maura for like two seconds? I thought your stink-eye was gonna punch me in the face! It just hit me why. You _like _her. Like _like _her. So why don't you just tell her?"

"Because I don't know that yet!" Jane bit out. "All I do know is that whatever I'm feeling ain't exactly, you know, _friendly_."

"Look, you two have always been more than just friends, even if you're not sleepin' together. You owe her the truth, Janie. Even if it's a muddled mess. Even if it's not 'friendly.'"

"Who isn't friendly?"

Jane had watched Maura approach from the safety of her brother's irises, but it still did not prepare her for the trouble in her gut at her friend's voice. Smooth, light, airy, the champagne to her own thick cream. The trouble slithered lower, and she rolled her chiseled shoulders. "Me. I'm not really all that friendly," the detective beamed in sarcasm.

"I disagree. You're _very _friendly," Maura teased, lips upturned and soft. Her body heat blasted Jane through her work skirt and blouse, "at least with me."

Frankie blushed so hard he almost turned purple. _Did they hear how they talked to each other? It would incinerate a lesser man right on the spot._ "Hey, Maura."

"Hi, Frankie. I didn't expect you," said Maura. She was genuine, not rude. The same sun that beat on Jane's roughed-up hands danced in her eyes, alive with pleasant surprise at seeing him. She really was something else, he mused. After his come ons, after his previous poor treatment of her, she still loved him. He could see why Jane had _unfriendly _feelings about her. He once thought he had, too.

"Yeah, I was just making some small talk with Jane. But, I've got somewhere to be, so, I'll leave you to it." He could already feel the lick of flames on his forearms just from sitting across from them. No way in hell he was going to stick around for the eventual fireworks, not when his sister was involved.

"Oh, so soon? Well, it was good to see you," Maura smiled at him. He waved to her as he walked off, and sent his sister a meaningful Rizzoli stare. The medical examiner made no move to switch to the other side of the booth at his absence. "What was that about?"

"Uh," Jane mouthed, her body speaking what her mouth could not. In the pause, her hand fell to the space between them, begging against her permission for any kind of touch. "Girl problems."

Because of the pronoun drop, it never occurred to Maura that Jane would be referencing herself. "Oh, poor Frankie. He does seem a bit cursed in that department."

"I agree: he lost you," Jane said, more to herself than aloud.

The words rattled through Maura's heart rather than her eardrum. "I don't think he ever really had me, Jane," Maura's eyes, wild to match the unexplained beating in her chest, begged Jane's to meet them, but the detective had other plans.

"Mmhmm. Where's Minerva at? The night is young and it's the beginning of the weekend!" through a just-a-little-too-big smile, Jane threw a hand at the waiter to motion for another MGD 64.

"She and I are having dinner tomorrow, and then we're going to a charity event that she is helping to host. But she knows that Friday are Jane days," Maura said, as though it were obvious. Her features were tinged with confusion, and she half-worried that Jane had forgotten this years-old detail about their friendship.

Jane felt so small that she figured she might fall to the floor and be swept away with the peanut shells. Here was Maura, her Maura, in a seemingly happy relationship, albeit very new, with someone local - someone who _lived in Boston, _for Christ's sake – with her. On a Friday night. As it always was.

Could she really have been so obtuse? So coldhearted, so stupid? Her boyfriend lived thousands of miles away, and half the time she could not be bothered to meet Maura when he was away half the time. Her heart hurt when she drank in the woman sitting next to her. Never again.

Maura would not let Jane flounder, either. She would give her a chance to redeem herself. Every time. "How are things with Casey? Have you heard from him?"

"He was supposed to be in town this week. I don't know if he came or not, because I told him I didn't want to see him," Jane answered. She squared her shoulders, her eyes clouded black at them mention of him, her musculature rolled and squeezed as she fiddled with the label on her new beer's bottle.

Maura reddened and gasped, her own quickened pulse surprising her. She attributed it to the relief sitting just on the tip of her tongue; it must have bubbled down into her insides like lava. "Well, I won't say I'm happy, but I am glad that you asserted yourself, Jane. You deserve so much better than he offered. You're too strong, too wild, to let someone like that own you."

"Wild, huh?" Jane deflected, wiggling her eyebrows, attempting to displace her own nervousness.

Maura nodded in severity. "Wild, warm, heavy, larger than life," she licked some perspiration from her lips, and Jane all but jumped. "I don't think he knew what to do with you."

"Oh, is that so, Doctor?" the detective asked.

"It's so. I do a better job and we're not even sleeping together."

No matter what else Maura said that night, Jane would not have heard. With that last statement, her ears were aflame for hours after.


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N: Now we're getting into the meaty shit, people. Let me know what you think of the chapter; I try to respond to every review that isn't anonymous, even if it is just to say thank you. Happy reading and reviewing!**

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Maura.

Maura in Carolina Herrera: black, sleek, bunched, plunging.

Maura, with her eyes smoky, smudged, inviting, a prelude smolder to the boiling want sitting in the core of her.

_Simply... Maura. _In her element: the charity function, dress code: formal. She had done this a thousand times before, often as a participant, this time as a date.

When she grabbed her clutch off the nightstand next to her, black to match her evening gown, she heard the pounding of her overworked heart in the silence of her giant home. All of this desire, nowhere yet to put it, and now Jane had reentered the fold, seemingly determined to set all her nerves aflame again.

It had been _months_.

Months since Jane had even sent more than a passing glance her way, months since Jane had said anything of weight to her that wasn't about a man, more specifically Casey. And now, here her friend was, back and positively scorching, like last night at the Robber.

The trouble of it all was that here, as sheer fabric rubbed against the tan of her thigh, _swishing_ in a sigh, in a moan she had been holding in since Jane had interrupted them, here she waited for her escort. Her Minerva, who was not Jane. Who, for all intents and purposes, titillated her to no end. Maura just assumed one shouldn't rather that the Rizzoli family clamor banged against her halls than that they be empty because she had a date with her lover. Their quaking comforted her, and Jane was the heady epicenter.

But they had poured out to give her privacy tonight, and there was a woman coming for her whom she had not sexed yet.

And oh, how she really wanted to. It had been more than months since she had danced that particular dance, more than months than she'd ridden out a climax on someone else. Because of this, she told herself, Jane's re-invigoration, her back-with-a-vengeance flirting, especially frustrated her. _To be payed attention to by anyone as charming as Jane would set anyone aflame,_ she thought. However, now that she had found someone to finally do something about all of that, the detective redoubled her attention, and seemed to take extra care to intrude on her and Minerva's attempts at intimacy. Twice since the night they were interrupted had it happened again, at the detective's unwitting hands, once by an impromptu visit and once by several phone calls and a annoyed voicemail that ended in Maura driving to her apartment to work on Jane's unresponsive car.

"Maura?" the soft murmur, practically cacophony in the silent Isles Manor, jolted the medical examiner out of her reverie. A pang of guilt ping-ponged around her thoracic cavity when her eyes finally kissed the soft face-lines of Minerva Portinari, standing, dapper as ever, in her bedroom doorway. "Is everything alright?"

"Yes!" the doctor squeaked entirely unconvincing, "why wouldn't it be?"

"Because I've been standing here watching you try to put the same Ferragamo heels on for the past minute and a half," said Minerva, her chuckle wafting toward Maura and latching onto her skin, rivulets of it trickling to her belly and down toward her extremities. God, what _was _it with Italians and their voices? This particular Italian shuffled through the thick air and bent down to ease Maura's foot into a black stiletto ankle-strap sandal, fingers brushing against an ankle with each nimble movement. She treated it like surgery, the push, pull, and lace of it precise, expert, and cool on the 98.6 of Maura's skin.

Maura wished it turned into anything but surgery. Anything but her job. They were even in her bedroom, for christ's sake. Jane certainly wouldn't show up now, would she? _God, what a mix of desire and confusion. Do people feel like this all the time? _"I was a little preoccupied. Are we going to be late?"

_Ah, yes. The whole reason for their evening._ "I don't think we'll be too bad. Plus – it's not like I'm a guest of honor, anyway. I've simply given some Red Sox Scholars the chance to go to summer camp with my money. Well, and also helped to pay for the hotel ballroom tonight," Minerva said. She switched to the other foot, and Maura smiled at the warmth suffusing her face. The doctor looked down, placed a hand over the happy features of the woman below her, fixing her laugh lines and running a thumb over the contented smile. _Content to serve me_. For a moment, the turmoil, the want and the Jane dissipated when she watched Minerva work.

"Well, it's probably for the best that you stay out of the limelight, no?" she rose, and held out a hand for Minerva to help her up.

"You're right, as usual," Minerva laughed, took the hand, and stood, now almost three inches taller than her date, even with the shoes. She kept their hands clasped and led them toward the front of the house, where her car awaited them both. "I don't know what's eating at you tonight, Maura, but let it go for a few hours with me, if you won't tell me what it is," she beckoned, unleashing a grin that simultaneously wound backward and forward. It curled her lips back against her teeth and yet its essence crept forward toward the pathologist, rolling over her, soothing her.

"Of course," said Maura. She stood in the open doorway, awaited a kiss, and she received one.

It was soft, dull zaps of arousal at her lips, not the rushing storm one might expect. Minerva tasted of peppermint, cool and fresh, the way Jane smelled of coffee, warm and lived in. This kiss lacked the bite of her previous ones, once tattooed with mint, now only tinged with it. The essence, mixed with the wetness, the gentleness of the woman's mouth caressing her own, did all the convincing necessary; she would try to 'let it go' tonight. It signaled to Maura, as a hand traveled up her back to cradle her, something she had not known before. Something that exhilarated and terrified the doctor: Minerva had fallen for her.

The woman in question, with those feelings snaking just under the murky depths of her eyes, only pointed to the passenger door of her Mercedes Benz. "Shall we? I'm sure the who's who of the Red Sox Foundation will won't know what to do with a killer like you."

* * *

"I think that boy doesn't know what to do with all his feelings for you, Maura Isles," quipped Minerva. They sat, comfortably enough, at a table in the convention hall of a local hotel, conforming quietly to their table of donors and volunteers. Well, as quietly as one could conform in the company of one Dr. Maura Isles.

The boy in question, no more than seventeen, awkward, lanky, even more so in his oversized suit, had not been able to peel his gaze away from her for more than five minutes at a time. Maura could not decide whether she were more pitying or uncomfortable. Minerva just laughed, and not-so-subtly intertwined their fingers for every time he stared.

"Yes, well, I wish he'd be more subtle about it. I don't know what to do if he comes over here and I have to let him down gently," whined Maura. Her date smiled at her sweet awkwardness. More worried about hurting the boy's feelings than preserving her own.  
"Eh, give him a break, dearest. It's his big night and he's feeling bold enough to look. So what? I can guarantee you he's not gonna come over here," Minerva responded. She took a sip from her wine glass and cast a glance around the crowded ballroom, filled with people mingling and finishing their dinner before the ceremony to honor the Red Sox Scholars, those chosen by the Red Sox Foundation to receive college scholarships for their hard work and dedication to school despite difficult circumstances. She landed on said boy, who was definitely sweating against his mahogany skin, most likely a mixture of his nervousness at having to go up on stage in front of so many people, and the thigh-high slit in Maura's evening gown. Or maybe the fitted bodice, gathered just under her left breast, stroking her skin with each breath she took.

"Oh? And how can you guarantee that? He's across the ballroom," Maura asked. She caught Minerva's eye and pulled her hand into her lap, hoping to feel comfort in another's touch; instead, the woman's low blood pressure and the air-conditioned room made her fingers feel cold against the medical examiner's. _An unfortunate circumstance._

"He's a smart kid, Maura. He's not going to come up to you, get shut down, and then go up there and speak in front of a couple hundred people. And by the time his little speech is done, we'll head over to the bar," Minerva answered. She pointed with her head to the far corner of the room, where a makeshift bar and dancefloor had been erected. It all looked a little prom-y, perhaps to make the teenage honorees feel at home, but the accountant would take it. Booze and charity always went well together.

"I suppose you have a point. But still, we can't be sure. So if he comes over here, please occupy me," pleaded Maura, moving a hand to Minerva's knee, hoping it would be warmer than her hand. No such luck, though it was not as cold as her hands. _Curse hypotension._

Minerva studied Maura's face, the features pulled inward a bit, in what she assumed to be discomfort but could also have been concentration. She place a hand over the one on her leg, patting it openly, lazily as a sign of reassurance. "Looks like they're about to start. This should be good; each kid from this year's graduating class will say a few words about where they've been accepted, where they've decided to go, and why the Red Sox Foundation means so much to them. They can stumble through at times, but it's the best part. It cuts right through all the charity bullshit and gets to the meat."  
So Maura saw. Charity was her element, a place she felt at home, so as soon as she settled into her role as active listener, she really began to see the beauty in what people like Minerva had done for such bright young people. One young woman talked about the symbiosis that suffused baseball like a backbone and all its nerves, and how the Red Sox Foundation had taught her that life needed to be lived through such interaction. She talked about people needing other people, needing a network of people to succeed, and that's what she'd been provided through the Foundation's help.

Another young man, not Maura's admirer, started by professing his love for statistics. He gracefully accepted the cheers as he shared the news of his acceptance and eventual attendance of BCU, and even thanked several individuals by name for helping him get to such a point in his life. And then, he began to cite numbers about the percentage of people from his part of town, people who were black, poor, and gifted, that didn't make it this far. That didn't graduate high school. He cited the disproportionate number of people of color in these situations, and called for people to use these numbers to attack the problem. He straightened his back, and called for the movement to help all people, not just those whom donors thought were "deserving," language used in the letter informing him of his scholarship bestowal, he said. His straightforward message sobered the audience, perhaps even turned off some of the more stodgy, but Maura watched Minerva nod silently from the chair beside her.

Finally, her young fan, Esteban Romero the emcee called him, took the podium. He sweated more now, practically right through his now-sodden dark button up. He pushed up the glasses on his crooked nose (probably once broken and never properly set, Maura mused) and began. "Those two people, Sophia and Derek, are my friends. We met out of mutual terror of doing things like this. As you can see, I'm not quite over that part yet," he motioned to his sweaty attire and showed his shaking hands. A rivulet of laughter started from the back and flowed forward to him, bolstering him a bit. A chuckle escaped. "But more seriously, we need both of them in order to make a difference. Or I guess I should say, we need their mindsets: all of us do. We need to marry them: the mindset of teamwork and the mindset of justice," he paused to take a drink of water from the podium, "Too often, in teamwork the individual gets swallowed, put away. And that leaves outspoken people like Derek in a state of otherness because he likes to speak up and has ideas that need to be heard. Ideas that, so far, teamwork hasn't been able to properly tackle."

"He seems very bright," Maura commented to Minerva. The brilliant light of the stage thrust them into shadows, so she couldn't make out the face of agreement looking back at her.

"I'm sure that's why they picked him," Minerva smirked, and Maura sensed her turn back to the orator. Her own ears prickled when she tuned back in.

"I guess what I'm trying to say isn't all that new," with a staccato cessation, he cleared his throat. The medical examiner wondered whether he needed to or if it was to signify that whatever came next was going to be very important.

It ended up being the latter, at least for her.

"It's just that, opposites attract. But, I also want to say that they do more than that: opposites need to marry one another. Teams need the strength of its individuals to carry on. The best teams need the passion for people and community, the emotion of someone like Sophia. The best teams also need the pragmatism and tempering calculations of someone like Derek. You can have fun with someone exactly like you: you can identify with them, you can understand them, you can commiserate with them. But you marry someone who complements you, if you do it right. You marry your opposite so that they sharpen and strike you, like iron. You don't necessarily need to understand them, but you need to understand you in order to make the marriage work. That's how a great team is. You do you, together, as they do them, and the results are simply electrifying. They're chemical, atomic – opposites not only attract, but meld together so tight that when they truly gel, nothing can separate them. That's the most valuable lesson that being a Red Sox Scholar has taught me – that it takes all kinds. Like minds are good to have, but the symbiosis of differences is what makes change happen," Esteban had accelerated from zero to sixty, and now his water dribbled over onto some of his papers before he put it down again. He looked off to the side to his friends to anchor him, and then excalimed, "Oh and by the way, I'm going to UCLA!"

After a beat of silence, the crowd became pitted with chuckles, and then boisterous applause. _They had chosen wisely_. He smiled, didn't dare to glance at Maura, and descended the steps as the emcee took over again.

_Shit_, Maura thought. _Shit, shit, shit, _somehow the only word that fit. The only word that encompassed her clammy hands, palpitating heart. Something someone says when they have been caught and exposed for their bad behavior. Something Jane would say.

Oh, Jane. Her attractive opposite in absolutely every. Fucking. Way.

To her left, Minerva Portinari – wealthy, kind, intelligent, refined. Her mirror image.

She was not one to adopt a theory blindly, but the way the words of the young Mr. Romero had rocked her, she knew that not testing it herself was out of the question. Minerva, with her Roman stature and designer sensibilities, was so fine... she needed to know if she could spark them into love. She suddenly raged to prove the young man wrong. She would attempt a compound with her reflection if it killed her.

While the official ceremonies closed and guests were released to mingle, she tugged on Minerva's sleeve. "You said you would dance with me, Ms. Portinari, so don't delay," she forced a smile, a force that Minerva noted.

The Italian stood, holding out her hand, her shoes clacking against the wood of the makeshift dancefloor that Maura had led them to. Not much light reached the bar corner of the ballroom, perhaps by design. Minerva delighted in the dimness; it and the slow song playing softly from a standup speaker provoked her to wrap Maura up into her arms. She reveled in the excuse to be in her element: touch.

Maura cursed it. She felt so much more comfortable with sight. If she could see the affection in Minerva's eyes, if she could watch the reactions in her body as she touched her, she could convince herself.

"I think I said I would take you to the bar," Minerva laughed, swaying them together gently, letting Maura grasp onto the lapels of her jacket, "but this works just fine for me."

"That boy turned out to be very extraordinary, didn't he?" the doctor asked, more in thought than to receive an answer. She turned her head to rest on Minerva's shoulder, running her hands down to lean sides.

"His speech was a little binary-heavy, but yeah, he's smart. He'll go far," the accountant, noticing a limpness to Maura's embrace, pressed her further. Fingers danced around an exposed left shoulder, and a clothed left hip.

Maura waited for the spark to zap, for the electricity to pulsate, but only tepidness came. Warm, not hot. It made her shiver.

Minerva felt the shiver in her own bones. Maura tried to further burrow into her, clawing in something approaching desperation. But that desperation would never come. _Of course. _"Cold, love?" she asked, stepping back from her date and scanning those hazel eyes, wet with something else she couldn't place.

_Shit_.

* * *

Jane's calves burned; the sweat that licked them providing little to no relief. Cool spring air wisped against her shoulders, bare, but again, the heat in her body shrugged it off more as a nuisance than as a help. Never had she felt more confined, hair sticking to her face, ponytail bouncing against her neck. Never more unsure, more gunshy. And for a cop, gunshy was deadly. Maura was out, out with Minerva, but with Jane mentally, falling in step with her outside her apartment's neighborhood, rounding the corner with her, ever one step ahead, beckoning. Maura always seemed so sure of everything – and that made Jane even more nervous and handcuffed. She blistered through the streets in attempt to clear her mind, her body straining, flying, moving, but running provided solitude that in this case, suffocated her.

Maura.

Jane could not stop thinking about her in any capacity. She was the burning in the detective's lungs now, she was the cement blocks on her mental feet. And that was ridiculous. Maura used to be the fire under her ass, the pep in her step. Maura used to be, and still was, her everything. So she made decision as she rounded back to her place. She would call her. And they would talk this out, despite the fact that Jane quaked in her New Balances all the way up the steps, and almost dropped her phone several times mid-text.

_Gotta talk to you. Hit me up soon? _


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N: To the anonymous reviewer who scrolled through all the Minerva parts to get to the Jane and Maura and said they felt guilty about it because I spent a lot of time writing them: you're right. I do. I'm not really upset that you scroll past Minerva because I understand the desire to get to the part where your OTP gets together. But I promise, that if you listen close to the Minerva parts, you will catch vital clues and Rizzles setup, whereas if you do scroll past, you're missing all of that. Like you said, I do spend a lot of care and time on those parts: because they're very intentionally doing Rizzles work while Jane is away. However, that's all your choice and you'll probably like this chapter anyway.**

******I hope that you ALL enjoy the chapter. It was emotionally taxing for me to write, probably because Jane and Maura are just so in love that it's hard to create something that lives up to that. Do I get points for trying? Haha. Let me know how you feel about it.**

* * *

"Is your detective home?"

Maura had managed to suppress thoughts of Jane for most of the car ride home and the walk up to her doorstep, until Minerva made a tiny joke that gave her not-so-tiny feelings: she yearned for Jane to be home, here at her house, burned for it, but directly across from her was this storm of a woman instead.

A storm that raged for her, she realized when she caught the desire in Minerva's molten eyes, churning and threatening to spill. The bile taste of guilt peppered the back of her tongue again: it was a storm she did not know if she could not return, or simply could not be bothered to. Her logic-starved brain begged for her to compartmentalize, but she resisted. "I don't think so, but I really am tired. Can I call you tomorrow? Maybe we can have brunch?"

"Of course. I'm sorry my little shindig wore you out," with concern, the Italian stepped forward to curl a strand of champagne hair behind her date's ear. Maura didn't look up, didn't open her eyes, but turned up her mouth in the saddest, most exhausted smile she had ever seen. _Poor Maura, _thought the accountant. _She really is so unused to all the emotion she is feeling._ "Are you really alright? I don't think I've ever seen you like this. So, out of sorts."

The affection swirling through her irish coffee vocals pulled Maura's head up. _God_, Minerva was so beautiful. Of course she was generally, with her narrow angles, unusual height, Greco-Roman face. But particularly here, standing just outside Maura's Beacon Hill home, illuminated by the porch lamp, it crawling all over her and grinding to the beat of dogs barking and crickets playing. Even the light wanted her, and why shouldn't it? Young, devastating, and more than a little shady. And, of course Maura was attracted to her. She cataloged all the Italian's idiosyncracies and came to the conclusion that she was very sexy. But as soon as the tiny flame between them had ignited, it slipped further and further from her. She hated it; she knew she deserved this, deserved to be happy. Even Jane had said so. _Jane. _"I'll be fine, I just need to sort myself out a bit, is all. You will hear from me in the morning, ok? I promise."

Minerva did not become successful in her line of work without the ability to lie and sniff out others' lies in return. However, the liar in this situation happened to be Dr. Maura Isles. She wasn't about to use her _mafia _voice and gruff out a threat in order to cease the deception. This woman, this circumstance, required care. And more than a lot of things, Minerva wanted Maura to be happy. So, after a simple, "Ok," in response, she kissed the side of the doctor's head. Without a goodbye, without a goodnight, she turned and walked to her car, driving off without a wave from her slender fingers.

It left Maura completely alone, standing in the doorway. Realizing that the buzzing in her hand came from her clutch and not the war in her head, she pulled out her phone and exhaled at the text: _Gotta talk to you. Hit me up soon?_

She didn't even have time to reply before her hands reached for her keys and she revved her Prius into reverse.

* * *

_Knock, knock, knock._

"Jesus!" Jane, hearing a pounding to match the banging of her heart, jumped into the air as she yelped. Still in running gear, downing a bottle of water near her kitchen, she panicked and searched for her gun. _Why do I always end up running without it? _She stalked toward the peephole, sighing with gusto when she saw the face on the other side. "Maura."

As soon as the door opened, said medical examiner hustled inside. She too performed a cursory search of Jane's apartment, scanning everything but the woman like two feet from her. She inhaled, knees growing weak. "You ran..." she squeaked, now tasting the smell of Jane on her tongue, warm spice and human exertion short-circuiting her taste buds.

"Yup..." Jane answered, wearing that face of bewildered amusement that Maura had only ever seen on her. The arch of her brows curved down toward her eyes, demanding they be stared into. Demanding that you lose yourself in them. Her lips raised to reveal her back teeth in a smirk, usually biting, only playful with Maura. The doctor imagined that those lips would be so...

"Are.. are you wet?" she asked. At Jane's dropped jaw, she recognized her grievous error. Turning various shades of red in rapid succession, she amended: "I meant, are you hydrating?" _Curse Jane. Curse Minerva. Curse Italians and their... effect._

The pulse point at Jane's neck thrummed her sinews all the way down to her hips at Maura's question. But now was not the time, dammit. "Uh-huh... Doctor's orders," she threw her head in the direction of the bottle of water on the counter. She wanted to laugh at Maura's wicked blushing, but was simply too fucking nervous.

However, she was also Detective Jane Rizzoli. Once faced with a challenge (that she could no longer think of a feasible way out of), she refused to back down. That meant, after motioning her discombobulated best friend to the couch (because she looked like she was going to faint), she would open the gates of the emotional hell she'd been damned to for the past 48 hours. "I take it you got my text?" her husk always scratched a little deeper when anxiety took hold; all Maura could manage was a nod, fearful what she might say before her friend could get a word in edgewise.

It was the nod, timid, bashful, near tears, that opened the floodgates.

"You know I broke everything off with Casey, for good," she started. Always start off with the truth – something to be stated unequivocally, unable to be argued. _Establish control, even if only to bolster yourself for skating over the edge, Rizzoli._

Maura absolutely knew it; she would never tire of hearing it. Would never tire of the faint _slick _against her underwear that it produced, now both times that she heard it. "I know," she responded simply, folding her hands in her lap, hands that all but begged to travel across the distance between them.

"I did it because of you," Jane said, with authority, with her backbone straight, her biceps flexing in tandem with the masseter muscle against her jaw.

_God. _Was it the words that enkindled a new pulse between her legs, or was it the proximity of all that unholy musculature? So close, all she would have to do is strip and close the distance... but Jane. Her Jane awaited her cue to continue. "y.. you did?"

"Yes. I told myself it was because I couldn't do that to you again, treat you how I did when he was around," Jane paused, wondered at the way Maura bit her low lip. Rolled it, licked it, touched it with her fingertips. _Trouble_. "But, it was because I couldn't do that to me again. I was the most miserable I have ever been when I cut myself off from you."

Maura resigned herself to the notion that this whole conversation would be a mix of heady arousal and heart pangs. She prepared herself for the ride, tears swimming behind her eyelids. Had they really not talked about this before, what it had _done _to them? If this is why Jane had texted her, to talk out Hurricane Casey, good. It needed so desperately to be done. "I would also appreciate it if you couldn't do it to me either," she asserted, and at Jane's shaky laugh, continued, "because unlike you, I don't have a vast network to turn to when I don't have you. In fact, there is basically only you. You're the only one I have so... intimately. Take you away, and until Minerva, I really had no one. So please, I hope that you also love me enough as your best friend to never do that again."

Jane bristled again, her lion's paws clenched on her thighs, as though ready to strike. She met Maura's eyes, soft, hazelgreen, supple, with her own: dark, severe, endless and hard. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about."

Suddenly Maura was confused. "Casey? We are talking about it, aren't we?"

"No. Minerva. Minerva and you," Jane's sentences became clipped, even harsh. Maura gave up all hope of understanding without an explanation.

"Alright... what about us? What's wrong, Jane? You're tensing up," she said. Before her brain could scream out against the never-going-back-from-it-ness of the touch, she rested her hands on her best friend's neck, squeezing and running thumbs over flushed cheeks.

_Big Mistake_. The first sign of vulnerability in Jane all night thundered around them and against their chests. Her rigidity left; eyes pleaded with Maura's to just hear her out. Maura wanted to oblige, but her hands had melded to their place, intent to diffuse all that heat, that sex in her, through touch. Jane had to pry her away and hold their hands in her lap to get her to come back from the cloud in her gaze. "I hate how I feel when I see you and Minerva together. I HATE it."

Maura swallowed the thickness in her throat. "How do you feel?" A part of her thought Jane jealous of her relationship – she had recently been engaged, after all.

"I feel jealous," Jane said, and when Maura went to speak, she stopped her. "No, come on Maura, let me say this, ok? While I've still got the balls. I feel jealous, and not because you're with someone and I'm not. I feel jealous _of _Minerva. I'm jealous of the time she gets to spend with you, even though that's ridiculous because you haven't stopped hanging out with me at all, not like I stopped hanging out with you while Casey was in the picture. Christ," she pinched the bridge of her nose, hating how the words were coming out.

"Can I speak now?" Maura asked, gently. Jane nodded, grateful for the chance to hold her tongue, to regroup. "Ok, well, to me, it's not ridiculous. You're not ridiculous, ok? You're my best friend. Before I met her, we had been spending an awful lot of time together. We needed it, we needed us time in order to get back on track, and we still do. It's ok to feel jealous that now you have to share. It's normal."

"No, it's not that I'm jealous that she gets to spend time with you Maura, and that's the bad part," Jane chuckled humorlessly, her whiskey voice dry as a bone.

"I wish you would stop villainizing yourself," Maura pleaded, settling for splaying her fingers on a bony knee, "now, it's just me. Just tell me, what are you jealous of?"

"I'm jealous of the kind of time she gets to spend with you," Jane stood as she talked, unable to take her sedentary cage any longer. She snatched her water with animal force and stormed back into the sitting area.

"Jealous of the kind of time...? _Oh..._" in that instant, she got it. _Shit_. The waters just became much choppier. "You're jealous that she gets to date me. To go on dates with me."

"Yeah," Jane managed to choke out before she sat back down. _Here goes nothing. _"I am jealous of that. When I think about you going out together, I wish it were me. I wish I were there, across the table from you because I want you to be looking at me the way you look at her. Well, that's not exactly right... I mean, I guess I want you to look at me every possible way that you look at a person. I want to be the one who says that I've seen all of you," with traction gained, Jane's stare blazed into Maura now.

She had to breathe, remind herself that her lungs, biologically at least, needed more than the run-musk of the woman across from her. She also needed to steel herself to say that which she was about to say. "So, you want to be with me, Jane? You want to date me?"

That mirthless laugh rocked her again. It quaked her, worried her. "See, that's the thing!" Jane flew up to her feet again, pacing the floor near the coffee table, "I don't know, Maura. I've never felt... like this about a woman before, not this strongly. But the thing is, I haven't felt this for any guy, either," she looked to her friend, both of them lost in the current, Maura tight-lipped in fear of what a statement would incite. For several long moments they stared, until Jane straightened her posture, and descended again to the couch. The softness in her face was present, but Maura would be a fool to mistake it for weakness. With more deadly resolve than she had ever had before, Jane spoke: "This thing in me for you? I don't know what it is Maura. I haven't quite figured it out. But it's a consuming son of a bitch. I see you with Minerva, I watch her open doors for you, cook for you, kiss you. That night, I watched her want you after I interrupted you both, when I first met her. I sat there at the table with her, and all I could do is feel contempt. All I could think when I was sitting there was, 'What could you possibly know about loving Maura? You couldn't know half of what I know.'"

Then, after a heartbeat of silence, the emotion of the day toppled Maura like a wave. She drowned in her own tears as though the Atlantic had besieged the living room of apartment 12. Shoulder-shaking, hiccuping sobs wracked the tiny woman, and Jane saw her for the first time, really saw her: evening gown still pasted to her body, one of Jane's old jackets on her back, smoky makeup quickly washing away in the assault. Even the perfectly styled blonde-brown hair couldn't bestow on her any size. Her Maura was _so small. _It took everything in her not to hold her, but she told herself she couldn't confuse Maura that way. The helpless feeling of earlier smacked her in the face.

"Her fingers are so cold on my skin, Jane, so cold," Maura cried anew, as though this revelation brought plague on all those whom she loved, "and everytime you're even on the premises I'm burning. With what, I d-don't even know. But it starts in my belly and by the time I look at you, it-it's all over me!" She spat out the last words as though they poisoned her, as though these revelations hurt her to hold inside.

A half hour must have past in the subsequent, bulging quiet between them. Maura reigned her sobs in to soft sighs and sniffles; Jane let a few tears pass her own cheeks out of Maura's watchful eye. She touched a surgeon's hand and smiled in a lame attempt to communicate ok-ness.

Maura saw right through it. The air smelled too much like Jane, like her body, the sight of her too visceral to even consider empty attempts at soothing. "What are we going to do?" She looked to the ceiling, her voice cracking anew.

"I don't know, Maura, I really don't," Jane snorted in what should have been laughter, but showed its true colors as lament. The lament of a daughter still lost in the dark. "I don't know what this is, and it terrifies me."

Maura sighed. "Do you love me?"

Jane actually looked angry that such as question was being asked of her. "Was there ever any question? I love you more than anyone, than anything. I love you and have loved you in a way that should baffle everyone around us, that sees us. It sure as hell baffles me."

Her oddly pithy, oddly romantic, always honest detective was in something mighty deep, that much she could see. "Then what is the problem? Let me love you like that, too."

"You already do. Love ain't the question. It's what I want it to mean. How's it gonna make my life look? How do I want my life to look? It will always include you, but I don't know to what capacity."

"Well, Jane," Maura stemmed the flow of more tears as she grabbed Jane's tired face and looked full into it from centimeters away. "I suggest you figure it out. I have some figuring out to do of my own. But you have to know that I won't wait forever should you decide something that does not include you solely belonging to me and me solely belonging to you. There is a woman out there," she nodded toward the door, "who loves me. I'm not sure she knows it yet, but she does. And she's sexy, kind, and smart. I am fairly confident that, given the chance, I could learn to love her back with ease." The lie came easy simply because all of her defenses were exhausted. There was the boldness of the tired left.

Before Jane could protest Maura's ultimatum, lips ghosted over her own. Her eyes ballooned at the fire that seared across her face; it must have incinerated the couch with the way it riproared, orange and molten through her torso and down to her sex. _All of this from the shadow of a kiss._

"I'm going to go see her, Jane, if only to talk. She deserves to know up front about this," the medical examiner rose to her feet, touched her friend's shoulder, and trudged toward the door.

Jane could only whimper.


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N: I thought about just posting this one with chapter ten, but figured it might be too confusing if I did that. Also, check out the song, "Odio," by Romeo Santos. It's the inspiration for the title and most of chapter eight.**

* * *

The apartment door, number 313, blended in with all the others on the floor, save for one detail. It sported the same dark cherry color, the same gold and looping knocker, the same clear, efficient numbers to mark it in the sequence of apartments. What changed it, what caused Maura to fear the knock she knew she had to start, was the faint hum that agitated the wood. Did she imagine the hum vibrating against her fingers? Maybe it was the shaking of her hands themselves as she gave her three distinct knocks against the door.

She heard heavy steps stumble forward, louder and louder, the antithesis of Minerva's usual feminine and deadly gentleclicks. The two locks on the other side _bump, bump clunked _open, as though a bear paw had attempted the task. For a split second, her skin went cold: was it really Minerva on the opposite end of the door? All sensory signs pointed to no. Suddenly, she felt the urge to flee.

The emergence of a groggy face, most definitely Minerva's, stalled her.

"Maur- maura?" Minerva grumbled, hands at her sides, but a smirk, half-concealed by her sleepiness, belied her out-of-sortsness. Maura watched her girlfriend watch her: black eyes caught hazel ones and infiltrated them. Would she see everything before she even got a chance to speak? Her body felt free, her limbs itched to move, even run, but as long as her eyes were held hostage, all of this was of no consequence.

Minerva, of course, watched all of Maura's watching. She saw the ruffled jacket hanging on her slender shoulders, slumped in exhaustion. It was a faded navy, and a distressted _Red Sox _emblazoned the front of it – something that Maura would never pick out for herself, but something Jane would be loath to give up, unless it were to the woman standing here. Her heart sank at the dawn gray of mascara around the doctor's eyes, smudged and like putting her tongue in a dirty ash tray. The sun had set on them and was rising on something else entirely. Either way, Maura had done some dying very recently.

"And what is the ghost of the Chief Medical Examiner of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts doing at my door?" When the doctor only smiled sadly, Minerva backed away, silk black pajama pants catching against the floor for each step. When the door closed behind them both, she abandoned all pretense and regained her glide about the room.

"We need to talk," Maura said, infusing her voice with as much sympathy and honey as she could. She observed Minerva moving about her natural habitat of spartanly furnished living and dining rooms, down the dark hall to a modern, stainless-steel filled kitchen. While she stumbled trying to find her way in the dark of it all, Minerva swung through it with ease, pulling down two shot glasses and a bottle of bourbon from a cupboard. _I see, _the pathologist thought, _the clumsiness of before was a ruse, probably to disarm me if I were an intruder. _Without even the notion that Jane would be proud of her detective work, she leaned awkwardly against the black granite of an island in the center of the tiled floor.

"I thought you were going to call me in the morning," Minerva responded, honestly surprised. She imagined it would take Maura more than three hours to come to grips with what she was feeling for Jane, especially since the clock had just struck one am. She put her hand over the other woman's and her thumb rubbed against the cluster of bone and vein it found there.

Maura accepted the gesture for what it was: soft, full of affection, but not passionate. Not meant to be passionate. Her heart ached. How much had her eyes given away back in the threshold? "I was, and I'm sorry that it's so late," tears crowded her consciousness again as she remembered what had just transpired, but at Minerva's dismissive nod, she strengthened herself to continue, even if just out of obligation to the kind soul across from her.

The kind soul poured her a hefty shot, nudging it into her fingers and seeing it into her mouth before she rose to turn on a light. "It's no trouble, Maura. Of course it's no trouble. I was just a little surprised to see you standing in my doorway so late and looking so... well, lost," she returned and poured her own medicine.

Maura winced at the burn down her esophagus. But once the taste was over, it lubricated her tongue, her limbs, her courage. "I honestly lost track of time, but I felt like it couldn't wait," she made the move to hold Minerva's gaze, the first time she had ever done so without sexual intent. An emptiness gnawed at the bottom of her stomach with the realization. For her lover, though, the murky boiling still raged in her eyes. Maura suspected that is was one thing the accountant could not hide. The guilt in her festered. She could not mislead anymore, because Minerva's eyes could not lie.

"Oh? And what could not wait til the morning?" she responded.

"After you left, Jane texted me. She said that she needed to speak with me," Maura began. Somehow the rest got stuck in her voicebox.

"Is she alright? Is her family alright?" Minerva asked, for a moment all business. Muscles tensed, a spine went rigid.

"Yes, yes everyone's fine, please don't worry," the doctor shot a hand to the Italian's forearm; the Italian instantly melted into a calmer state of being. _Shit_. Maybe she shouldn't touch anymore. "she wanted to talk about us."

"Me and you?"

"No. Well, that came up, but more about her and me," Maura whispered softly, head bowed.

_Rizzoli beat her to it. _"Ah. And what did you talk about that you needed to run right here?" Minerva whispered back, holding Maura's head up by the chin so gently that Maura could not tell who initiated the action of her looking up. "Maura. My dearest. You don't have to tell me anything, but I hope that you will. I hope that you will tell me what has been eating away at you. Maybe, maybe if you vomit it up, it won't consume you anymore," her voice trembled with the most emotion Maura had ever heard in it. Granted, the timbre of her words only heightened for the most fleeting of moments, maybe a non-scientist would not have noticed. But the tears returned to the back of Maura's own throat at the plea.

"I'm actually not quite sure how to summarize it all. I think that, in her way, she told me that she's in love with me," Maura admitted weakly, sighing at the words as they left her lips. Even the admission of that something so new (so old, too) between herself and Jane blew a fire into her belly, not unlike the bourbon she had swallowed not long before. She felt a little lighter, a little more able to look Minerva in the face. But the accountant had other plans.

"That's not what I meant, you know. I figured that much. The way she molds herself to you, everyone with eyes can see that she loves you. Maybe, if you tell me, you won't feel so exhausted, and maybe it will be a little freeing," Minerva stared hard into Maura's eyes, which were still ablaze with arousal from her thoughts about Jane's confession. It had to be said, and she and Maura both needed it to be said aloud.

Suddenly a wet cold sunk onto Maura's skin. Minerva would not settle for half-truths, she surmised, not like so many in her life had before. "What do you mean? I just told you. I went to Jane's, and she wanted to speak to me to admit that she loved me." She started to shake, the pre-quake to the oncoming 10.0.  
"I mean," Minerva started and stood from her perch on a barstool, "that you need to say the thing coming between us. Say it aloud," she filled both glasses and pushed them both toward Maura. Maura did not take. The accountant sent her a look that insinuated that she would need them both soon.

"I don't... I..." she stammered, white-knuckle gripping the island. Her pulse ricocheted inside her whole body for very different reasons than hours ago. Fear rode the fast track of proteins and alcohol in her blood.

"Maybe," Minerva gulped, presumably to swallow the emotion before it swallowed her, "maybe if you tell me that you are so helplessly in love with Jane that you don't know what to do with yourself, you'll start to feel a little better. And stop looking so damn broken-hearted all the time. Cause that's breaking _my _heart."

By the time she finished, Maura found herself in the throes of hiccuping cries again. Her voice cascading in the silent nooks and crannies of the kitchen, cutting jagged edges into the air, artificial with the light up above the both of them. She couldn't help but sob all over again when she saw that the tumult in Minerva's eyes had bubbled over onto her face: crow's feet prominent, mouth pursed in worry. God, she felt like a fuck up. "But... but you l-l-love me..." she managed to croak before her voice became mangled by her own emotion again. She let herself be drawn into the embrace of the woman across from her, the woman who wanted her, the woman she, much to her sorrow, she did not want anymore.

"You figured that one out, huh? I didn't even know until today," Minerva chuckled. She ran a smooth, long hand against Maura's back, feeling the worn-in fabric of Jane's sweatshirt. Jane had been everywhere with them since day one. This just happened to be a physical manifestation. The irony tightened her grip around the crying figure huddled against her, giving one last ditch effort to melt into her. The fires were nowhere near hot enough, nowhere near mutual enough.

"H-how? How could I say it and d-do that to you? Y-you've bbeen so kind, so g-good to me," Maura choked. Minerva smelled like laundry detergent and a faint, androgynous cologne.

"Maura, you need to look at me," confident that she was, Minerva began again, "I've been good to you. That's true. And I love you. But, you aren't anything without her love. I fell in love with someone's love for another. Remember when we met? The way you stood your own with us gangsters, the way you stood up for the law, for justice? That was Jane in you. And the way you carry yourself? With pride, and assuredness, and strength? You are so proud of all the things that Jane sees in you. Even then, you were in love, loving Jane with who you are," Maura stood slackjawed in her arms, tears no longer wracking her, only dropping fatly down her cheeks. "I fell in love with you while you were already in love with someone else. And it was not an integral part of your character – it was, is, _you_."

Finally, it was between them in a way that neither of them could hide away. Maura sighed, the fight gone from her. Everything gone from her, the outer layer of emotional fat burned away, leaving her exposed, leaving her raw, leaving her wanting Jane, if only to not have the ability to hurt this woman anymore, this woman who felt so true against her. So true, but so unable to strike the heat. Her eye caught the two shots by her side, and she downed them both.

Minerva laughed, her voice vibrating against Maura's forehead as the other woman returned to the crook of her neck. "I told you that you would need both of them!"

Maura grumbled, the tension easing out of her by the second. "I never argued. But it's not quite fair. Since it tasted so bad, I had to chase the first down with the second," why did Minerva seem so wildly ok with it all? Quick touches to latissimus dorsi and trapezii belied the confidence in the Italian's speech, the free flow of her laugh and speech, and Maura's heart started to hurt again – the woman's body showed signs of the loss she was experiencing. The loss of Maura. "But I think I drank a bit too much. All of the sudden I'm exhausted."

"It is almost two. Would you like to sleep here?" Minerva asked, knowing the answer, somehow, before she received it.

"No, I shouldn't. I should go home and sleep," Maura sighed, squeezing the body under her embrace. "I'm so sorry, Minerva. So sorry that I did this to you. That I'm still doing it to you."

"Eh. The heart wants what the heart wants, baby. You can't blame yourself any more than I can blame you; you were far gone before you even walked through Daniel's office door."

"You're probably right," Maura nodded. Reluctantly, she dropped her arms, afraid Minerva would crumble and she would not be able to sweep her back up again. No such thing happened. She stood, without Maura's help. "Well, I should go home, it's very late." Maura grabbed her keys from her purse, and moved toward the exit, intent to have Minerva follow.

She did. They walked all the way to the door before she spoke again. "Tell me something, Maura. I know that you and I, we're on our way out. But will you dance with me one more time? For old time's sake before we part? Our Spanish club downtown," she asked, almost timidly. Maura wondered at the sight.

"Of course. One last time, Minerva, one last time. Tomorrow night?" before she could finish her response, Minerva kissed her, long, but cool, with temperance. Friendly. Maura held the face moving against hers, kissed softly, shortly, sweetly back, and then exited with the same sad smile as before. She had her answer.

* * *

Tomorrow night the night of the dance, had come, and Minerva Portinari had come to know Maura's neighborhood and home well. When she stepped onto familiar cobblestone, crossing to the well-lit courtyard, she affirmed her decision of earlier in the night to forego the flowers; it seemed that Maura had plenty, and cultivating this new thing with Jane would take all of her pruning prowess.

She had given up the fight. She meant what she had said the night before (or early that morning): the things she loved about Maura were the things that resulted from her love for Jane, and Jane's love for her. She had seen the two of them at work for the first time, that night she and Maura had started their singular foray into sex, and suddenly Minerva knew why her girlfriend wanted her so badly but then couldn't seem to find enough pleasure in anything they did: she didn't want _her_, she wanted another tall, dark, beautiful Italian. Oddly enough, the intensity of her feelings for Maura did not send her into a jealous rage, or the depression-fueled alcohol binge, as was the response of choice to stress for many in her family.

No, there was only a hollow, strong need for Maura's happiness. Minerva craved happiness for the other woman on a visceral level. It was much like a midwestern wind: weightless, invisible, but so overpowering on some days as to near topple her over. Her heart wanted Maura to be happy, her lungs wanted Maura to be happy, her bones wanted Maura to be happy, her veins wanted Maura to be happy. She knew Jane would make her so, simply because it was Jane, or lack of Jane, that had made Maura so _sad. _Only something with the capacity to bring you down so low had the capacity to swing the other way.

Minerva knew, that for Maura, she was a block of C-4. With enough heat and enough spark, she could have detonated the tiny woman. To give the doctor credit, she sure had tried – molding and twisting her to fit the Jane-sized hole within. However, all the heat necessary, all the vibrating and humming and pulsating necessary to get them going had been rerouted elsewhere: Jane. For Maura, Jane was an a-bomb. She rewrote her chemistry, decimated her for miles, and her radiation would color the doctor for generations, long after they were both gone – Maura's love for Jane would last for decades to come. Maybe centuries. Against that, Minerva had no chance.

And, if being the daughter of a mobster had taught her anything, she thought as she reached for the spare key in a place above the door only she and Jane could reach, it was to not fight a fight you could not win. In the real world, in the world where justice happened to be a thing, fighting against something much bigger and bound to beat you took on a noble timbre; people saw it as a sign of tenacity, a boost to your legacy. In the world where men burned the likenesses of saints to pledge loyalty to Patriarcas and Portinaris above everything, doing so got you killed, made you foolish. You are out to build an empire, not a monument to yourself.

She twisted the key and pushed open the heavy door, her nose assaulted by the smell of Maura's perfume. _I have no chance. _She took the steps two at a time, anxious to see the woman as much as she could in the next few hours. When she pushed into the bedroom, a place she hadn't seen since their failed night together, she saw Maura, applying jewelry in front of a mirror, deadly still in a strapless black dress, a red trench coat waiting to be slipped on her shoulders. "Hi," she breathed, unable to really articulate much more, and Maura smiled, more to the mirror than to the woman in her doorway.

"Hi yourself. Come here so that I can hug you," she returned. _Probably not a good idea, _Minerva winced, but before she could protest, the pathologist wrapped around her, squeezing her, tattooing her with the smell from the hallway.

She could only return the favor. Let them meld together one last time. "I hope it's ok that I came up. I actually didn't even realize until right this moment that I might no longer be welcome in this part of the house," she looked down at the woman around her until Maura looked up.

She just sighed. "Just because we are breaking up does not mean that I am going to ice you out, Minerva."

"I figured, but a ban from the bedroom is a far cry from cutting me out of your life," Minerva chuckled, a bit relieved that she hadn't overstepped. She surveyed the room, immaculate, bed made and spotless except for the cell phone near the pillow on the side closest to the master bath. Dressers and other furniture carried no dust, nothing seemed out of place.

"Give me a minute to freshen up and then we will go," Maura said. She released Minerva, and clicked the door and lock of the bathroom shut.

This left the mobster's daughter alone, and the silence had her ears pounding. _This will be the last time_, she reasoned to herself. She would not force herself into a life to complicate an already monstrously complex situation. Maura and Jane. Such a storm, such a shitstorm really, so tumultuous, grand, chaotic, that there was no way for it to fail, once it got off the ground. _If it ever did_. The two seemed content to torture themselves forever. That she could not help.

Or could she? The phone still sat there, unassuming, unused at the side of the bed. She drummed her fingers against the bedspread where she had taken a seat, the sure sign of a mind in motion. Moments like these bolstered her confidence in her upbringing: where people had black and white lines delineating right and wrong, good and bad, for her, it was muddled to gray. So much that something like this, like what she was about to do felt right in every way.

She awoke the phone, scanned it for a moment until she found the text messages, picking the most recent one from Jane. The one she must have sent not longer after Minerva left the previous night. The Italian opened it, chose _reply_, and typed a swift message to send off with seconds to spare before Maura returned.

_Meet me at Club Caribe at ten thirty. No questions, Jane._

With that sent, Maura swung the door open. Minerva smiled, grabbed the phone and waved it, putting in her date's clutch. Maura nodded in gratitude, put the clutch under her arm, and off they went to Club Caribe.

* * *

"What?"

"I said, it's very warm in here, despite the fact that it's not filled to capacity," Maura observed in her partner's ear. Body heat, more specifically an amalgam of Minerva's and her own, traveled down the dip of her back. More serious partygoers hadn't arrived yet, and the majority of those who enjoyed salsa and Latin music more than drinking and grinding had started to leave Club Caribe.

"You were just shaking it somethin' pretty serious just now," Minerva breathed, her words cooling the sweat near Maura's temple, "I'll bet that skews your findings a bit." A calmer song, still with a dancing beat but with lethargic drums and weepy guitars, slowed them to a sway on the floor, in the arms of one another.

Minerva must have known it, the song, the way her shoulders slumped, the way her lips pulled into a tight frown until she found the wherewithal to swallow. She'd shown more emotion in the last twenty four hours than Maura had seen in her all their time together. The emotion on her face now looked almost like acceptance, with touches of grief and concession. _Oh, the things that music could do, _Maura mused. What memories swirled in her brain, twirled the way she twirled Maura now? The light was dim; they could make out faces, but details escaped. Maybe Minerva mourned the fact Maura's eyes, her mouth, her features, dulled in the lighting.

The medical examiner was about to comment on the melancholy mixed with ease, both exuding off of her dance partner, but then she stiffened. Stiffened in the way that Maura had seen her stiffen around possible enemies out in public before. She stiffened mid-sway, and Maura pulled her head back to see an unmistakable reflection in her eyes:

Tall. Lean. Dark. A wavy mane of wild black hair, if her mind was not playing tricks with her. All of Minerva's symphony of defeat now made sense, and she bristled with anticipation. _Turn me, turn me, turn me, god dammit, _she thought, pleaded, all but aloud. Even in the pupil of Minerva Portinari, that specter cut the finest figure she'd ever seen.

Finally, after thousands of moments that felt like thousands of years, she got her wish. _Jane. _It didn't matter why Jane stood there in the door, just having waved her badge to get looking at her, eyes raging, lips snarling, and she realized it was probably due in no small part to the fact that she stood behind the body of someone Jane saw as competition. Maura went to drop her arms, but a tickle against her ear stopped her.

"I'm sorry, Maura. But I couldn't just watch anymore," Minerva's words chilled the sweat on the doctor's back. "I texted her. But make no mistake: she's here for you."

Maura felt rooted to her spot, one Italian hanging on her and her little black dress, another crossing toward them with vehemence. God, the inferno between them raged, melted everything around them. Even Minerva felt hot under her fingertips considering the circumstances. Did her black blister? Did her skin burn from Jane's raw, rippling power? "Go, before she gets here and rips me apart," Minerva implored. Maura looked at her face, watched her eyes glued to the opposite wall of the club. Careful not to look at her, careful not to turn around and look at Jane. Maura shook her head to stave off tears, and kissed the woman's cheek the way she would have kissed her mouth only forty eight hours before.

Then she ran. She ran, closing the distance between herself and Jane, possibly forever. Jane caught her, hands clawing at the painted-on dress, fingers playing a possession sonata on her hips, her sides, her ass.

_Good fucking God. _"I take it you made your decision, Detective," Maura rasped, right before dipping her tongue to taste Jane's responding grumble.


	10. Chapter 10

**A/N: Here's the last chapter of _Odio! _Thank you all for coming along this ride with me. I had a lot of fun writing it. BTW, Beyonce's "Rocket" was pretty much all I listened to when finishing this up, if you wanted insight into how I work. :)**

**Shout out to all those who favorited, followed, and reviewed. And to my regular reviewers, you know who you are, thank you for being kind enough to return after nearly every chapter to give me your feedback. It means a lot to me.**

* * *

"So, you and Minerva glued to each other on the dance floor, was that little display back there supposed to make me mad?" Jane asked, her body showing that if the answer was yes, it had worked. Her limbs purred with intention, her energy resonated with the air around her – she had _tackle a 300 pound suspect to the ground _written all over her.

It took Maura a moment to recover. _Just give us a few moments to get inside, and you can tackle me anywhere you want_. Had Jane asked something? Oh, yes. She had. "Of course not. She took my phone and texted you. It wasn't me," the doctor responded, humored Jane, but only because she feared her running in the opposite direction. It happened anyway.

"That bitch! I swear to god right now I will find her and-"

"Jane! Come back here," Maura snapped. The detective stopped, halfway to her car in Maura's driveway. "Are you honestly that mad? Look where we are right now. My house. Your mother gone for the night, no one else around. Even remotely. I'm thankful to her," the last part was husked out, for Jane had begun to stalk back toward her. "Because here I am, alone, with you."

"Nowhere you'd rather be?" Jane raised a black eyebrow, long, sharp; the movement dragged itself along Maura's belly like a hot knife. The face looking down at her came together in the most pleasurable amalgam of sharp angles and soft skin, severe in its infernal stare, sexy in its accusation.

A harbinger of death? Maura hoped it was a little one. Hoped that her own eyes were hot enough to relay the message that she had been a bad, _bad _girl. "Nowhere I'd rather be."

"Good, then I can kill her later," Jane smirked through the entire sentence. The smirk itself was dark, the opposite of all the bright lights in Maura's courtyard. It much more belonged in the blackness of the house, where it would be more at home. Where she would be more at home. She crossed back to Maura, slowly, trying so desperately to hold onto something she couldn't quite name, knowing that if she sped through the trek back to the front door like she sped through everything else, she might lose it, drop it, or it might eat her alive.

"Jane...!" Maura had no doubt meant it as an admonishment; she even slapped one of Jane's arms in protest. But how it came out, oh, how it _came out._ A whisper, a whimper, a moan, and a prayer all in one. The result was a calamity between Jane's hips.

"All jokes aside, Maur..." the detective began, and Maura let herself be glided toward the front door. There were those hands again, against her, around her, locking into place in the spaces of her curves, filling her out, completing her body puzzle. Her eyes fluttered shut when Jane placed open lips against hers, feeling them, breathing on them, but never closing the distance. "... we need to talk."

The medical examiner couldn't decide if it was the most devastating of let downs or the most intoxicating foreplay. She felt drunk between her legs. "We have forever to talk. We have..." she gulped when Jane's front melted against hers, thudding them into the closed front door. "we have tomorrow morning to talk."

"Oh. Am I coming back tomorrow morning?" Jane asked, the obtuseness not reaching the twinkle in her obsidian eyes, nor the gruff twine of her larynx.

"Hopefully you'll wake up here tomorrow," Maura stated shamelessly. Now was not the time for games. She was tired of them. They had danced around each other for years now. It was time to dance _with_ each other.

Jane whimpered for the second time in twenty-four hours.

Maura saw her opening, and took it. "Hopefully, you'll wake up here tomorrow..." she used one hand to fumble with the doorknob and the other to tug Jane in by the belt loops, "naked. Next to me. Beacause this is not where our night ends. It should not be where all of this... ends." Before she could finish, she scoured her hands over the concoction of them, her hands working like glue to keep them together.

Jane gulped in some of her anxiousness, and nearly tripped them over the rug in the foyer. _Shit_. "Well, maybe I hope all of that, too. But we still need to talk. Before this happens."

Maura, stripped of her patience and waiting to be stripped of other things, dragged them to march up the stairs. She even climbed them backwards, and Jane let her. Until she fumbled with the buckle at the detective's waist.

"_Maura,_" Jane growled. Her lip curled high; reached her nose. Maura knew, even though they were cloaked by the dark, because of the little gleam of canines made visible by the light of the window that rattled her bones.

Jesus, did everything Jane say turn her on? Only the interrogator in her tone made her stop, step away from her to look her full in the face. "What is it?"

"We need to talk because I have never done this before," Jane hissed, pupils still saucers, waving a Sicilian hand between the two of them.

"Done what? Sex? I know that isn't true," Maura studied her incredulously, and a certain pregnancy scare popped invaded her thoughts.

"No. You know damn well what I mean. Sex with another woman," Jane said. Now there must have been a pink tinge to go with the olive on her cheeks.

"So you do want to do it? Tonight?" Maura asked. She pursed her lips in a wicked simper and wiggled her eyebrows. She really could not help herself, uptight Jane needed an adjustment and she'd be happy to be the one to give it.

She did not anticipate the rush of a body pounding her into a nearby wall. She did not anticipate the snarl in her ear, seeming to become Jane's preferred mode of communication. She did not anticipate the hand affixed to her ass like a Italian augmentative, bestowing grandness onto everything. And that was Jane: a hand on her behind was the biggest of commands, commitments, a goddamn _gestone. _One she would always be embarrassed to say but never too afraid to there was nothing else to do but wrap a leg around a thigh and let the hand drag its fingers along, leaving goosebumps, her dress riding up shamelessly. "I want to do it. I want to take you to places you haven't been before. I want to take you apart and put a piece of myself inside before I build you back again," Jane answered, hands roaming, voice near cracking.

"Then let me teach you how to lead," Maura responded. She took Jane's hand, the one resting on her quadricep, and led her to a place she had been what must have been a thousand times.

But, familiarity or not, Jane had never seen Maura's bedroom quite like this.

Filtered through complete darkness and utter arousal.

Staring at a bed that she was supposed to be on, supposed to be fucking Maura in. _Supposed_. Sounded like obligation, felt like home. Maura stood patiently at the foot, surveying Jane in her natural habitat. Her _most_ natural habitat. Jane reveled in the possession that pumped through her: no matter what she had done or how often Minerva had been in here before, it no longer mattered, and something, perhaps that same possession, compelled her to speak. "It doesn't matter what you did with Minerva here," she said. It was closer to a whisper but it resounded between the both of them like a bellow.

"No, you're right, it doesn't," Maura stated, unsure where this was going, but willing to walk there with Jane. Willing to walk anywhere with her.

"It doesn't matter," Jane repeated, "Because whatever she did to you, whatever she did with you," closed the body gap yet again, "no one but me is ever going to do again," kissed the pathologist with more teeth and tongue than lips.

"Let me touch you," Maura exhaled. What other appropriate response to such a grandiosity, to their first kiss that screamed _fuck me_, would there be? The woman scratching at the zipper of her dress, literally breathing breath into her, knew her body better than anyone had known it, ever. This woman's body, in the most mundane of situations, of life circumstances, flooded her body with its pheromones: some meant to calm, just with a wave hello, some meant to excite with a splayed hand to the small of her back, some meant to _in_cite with a stomp of the foot, a tantrum. Some meant to ask, "how's your day?" with a hug. Some meant to tell her she's the only one in the room that matters with a penetrating stare. All pheromones meant for her, all deadly when creating a cocktail with her own, when rewriting her chemistry.

Why, oh why, had she never noticed before? Noticed Jane having sex with her from the moment they met? Sometimes it was lovemaking in the morning, a fragrance tinged with the coffee the detective bought especially for her, tattooed on the cup in the places where long fingers once were. Sometimes it was a maddening fuck in her office during a long case: Jane would blister through the doors, thundering curses, theories, questions never meant to be answered, leaving an unmistakable musk behind when somehow, together, they would climax toward a breakthrough.

Jane's body had coalesced with Maura's body for _years. _And now Jane was nodding, consenting to the touch she'd asked for, shakily prayed for. Jesus, she knew what she wanted first, and Jane's red tee was the first to go.

"Fuck..." Detective Rizzoli gritted when Dr. Isles pulled fingernails in a trail down her abdomen, sculpted, lean, and soft, but cussed when Maura dropped to her knees and replaced those fingernails with her tongue. When the tip of it reached pants, she snaked it back up again, biting skin along the way.

"That is the plan, yes," she quipped in response, standing, shimmying out of her dress, exposing her lingerie to the moonlight and to Jane.

Intended affect achieved: the woman in front of her fumbled with her belt buckle like a madwoman, fingers shaking and trousers uncooperative. Maura let Jane struggle for a few heartbeats, giggling to herself, eying the struggle before stepping in. "You're a quick learner and I expect to only have to show you this once," she teased, running their entwined hands in tandem through the unbuckle, and then the lowering of the zipper.

"I'd stop and walk out that door right now if I weren't so far gone, Maura Isles," Jane warned, unable to stop the smirk from peppering her features.

And that was it, as it always was between them: alternations between banter and silence; bodies communicated the little things. _I want you_, said Jane's kiss to Maura's mouth, said her hands to the patch of skin just under the bra clasp she plucked open. _You have me, _responded Maura's teeth to Jane's lower lip, said the heaving of her freed breasts toward Jane's own covered ones. _Time to divest her of that particular article of clothing._ One doctor then led the hand still glued between her shoulders past the valley curve of her back, up and across her belly, letting fingers curl and unfurl as they pleased as they reveled in the softness of her. She ended their journey with a scarred palm and a push against the blush of a nipple, firmer by the second.

"Touch, like I know that you want to," Maura urged, and Jane complied, moving her other hand to the other side, twins kneading and grasping to an unheard rhythm.

"Do what I want?" asked Jane. Her husk sounded less like a question and more like a demand. The force of it threw the both of them onto the bed behind them, Jane nearly tripping out of her pants.

Maura worried her lip between her teeth at the sight of a certain pair of legs in a certain pair of black boxer briefs, material sucking on the muscle there, elastic band sitting below the abdominals she had just licked like a fucking lollipop. Could someone be this jealous of a piece of clothing? Then again, that underwear did _not _have one predatory Sicilian-American bombshell hovering over them, waiting for the signal to strike. "You are Detective Jane Rizzoli. Since when have you ever done anything except what you want? I'm not about to stop you."

The glint in Maura's eye, the way her hips sought the grind, tugging at her own pelvis with some invisible, irresistible pull, the words that traveled from her ear down to her gut and below, all of it gave her the courage to let go.

The confusion, the jealousy, the heartbreak of the recent weeks was subsumed under the ecstasy of taste of this neck, this dip between two full breasts, this raised nipple on the pad of her tongue. None of it compared to the smell in the air when she pulled a lacy black v string away from Maura's legs, the smell of warm vanilla sugar and sex. More sex than she had ever smelled in her feeble, pathetic sexual lifetime before this moment. Something so strong that she had to see the source, despite the whimpers for her return up north.

Down south, apparently, was where it's at. On and poppin', the party spot, the place where all Jane's insecurities got washed away. It was so damn wet, staring her in the face, that the washing was all but literal. There was a little glisten, a gleam, and a little swelling, and a lot of _hello, Detective. Welcome home. _Her mouth prepared itself for it, mirroring it, growing wetter and coating her gums. Looking up at Maura to ask permission must have been the hardest thing she had ever done.

But she did it, and Maura nearly cried out for wasted time. "If you don't do _something _right now, I am going to do it for you," she hissed. She lifted her lower body up, seeking contact of any kind, and that was when she felt it: heat and insistent muscle gliding through the pulsating epicenter between her hips. "Oh, _shit..." _she moaned, loud; it reverberated off the walls and she slumped back to the mattress.

Jane watched her grab pillows, the duvet, sheets, anything in reach as she writhed with each stroke, easy, slow, torturous, long. The whole length of her. Up and down, up and down. The taste, sweetandsalt, far exceeded the perfume of it. The detective, with just knowledge of her own body, guessed Maura near oblivion. This, she could do for hours, and this apparently worked.

"It... it won't take much more..." the medical examiner said. The way she looked when she arched, twisted, and panted, fingers now massaging the scalp between two thighs, the way the moon ran a wild streak of light across her heaving chest, Jane knew the same was true for her, too. It wouldn't take much.

Maura came noisily, her cries sending lightning bolts straight through her partner, who licked until small hands pulled her up by the shoulders. _Look at me, _they beckoned, so she obliged.

"Hi," Jane said, when she had climbed on top of the body she never wanted to leave. It felt so right under hers.

"Hi yourself. So much for needing to be taught, my dear," Maura laughed, full and loud, pulling in a blushing Jane for a kiss, one filled to the brim with mirth, adoration, satisfaction. Jane slid into place on top of her, her divine musculature filling every space and spreading warmth to every curve.

"I didn't say I would be helpless, just giving fair warning that I'm a rookie," the Italian quipped. Her heart melted when Maura wrapped her limbs around her for a full body hug.

"You could have fooled me. But, I do believe it's my turn to bat now..." with a quick turn, however, that hug morphed into a naked medical examiner straddling a flipped detective, towering over her, a twinkle in her eye so wicked that Jane knew she would be in trouble for years to come.

* * *

Early morning purple-orange filtered through her bedroom window, and Maura reasoned that this was how life should have been from the start: Jane Rizzoli, clothes-less, open-mouth breathing, sleep-sprawling over two thirds of her bed. However, this was only the first morning after, and she vowed to make it the first of many, many more.

Her own body woke her, forever on its rigid Monday schedule, up an hour before she needed to get ready for a full workday, but this was the first time she cursed that part of her. She wanted to stay in bed, marveling at the creature in it, as docile as Jane could be before opening her eyes, but the memory of caffeine pulled her from the sheets toward her closet for a robe, and then out the door toward the kitchen.

She decided that she would have tea that morning. She turned to grab the kettle from the island counter, and that was when she saw it: a solitary envelope, fat with papers, and a post-it note affixed to the front. Maura cursed her timing: she felt fear prickle at the base of her spine, and she longed for her protector conscious and here with her, not to be alone with whatever insanity the paper held.

Upon closer inspection, however, she allowed herself to breathe a sigh of relief. She recognized Minerva's scribbled handwriting, such a contrast to Jane's bold capital letters. She opened the envelope first, revealing the completed sale of her father's businesses to one Mr. Tommaso Portinari. This also proved to be a relief, everything out of her hands and in the capable ones of Minerva. The post-it, bright green, unmistakable, like the accountant herself, read as such:

_Text me if your detective ever needs tickets – the Foundation has hookups and I must admit I don't hate losing to people like her._


End file.
